


Rise of the Phoenix

by NPE94



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: HPFT, Dark, Drama, Multi, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-06-01 13:19:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 24
Words: 184,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6521452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NPE94/pseuds/NPE94
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is 1976 and Aurora Meadows, a buccaneering curse-breaking witch, returns home from China after the death of her brother in suspicious circumstances. Finding her country under a cloud of fear, gripped by the chaos of an emerging super-powerful dark wizard, referred to only as "You-Know-Who", she takes on the Ministry to discover the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Gathering Storm

“How did you do that to yourself, again?” said Theo.

His eyes were focused on a jagged, discoloured line that protruded from the cuff of Aurora’s left sleeve.

“What,” said Aurora, somewhat distractedly, pulling herself away from the letters in her hand, “you mean this?”

She gestured down at her wrist.

“Yeah, what happened?” asked Theo.

After a moment’s hesitation, Aurora replied, a little hesitantly, “Well it’s a long story actually.”

“We have plenty of time,” remarked Theo, amused by her reluctance to divulge more.

With a sigh, she slipped her shoulders out of her coat, and pulled back her shirt. She turned her forearm towards the ceiling so that it reflected off the dim temperamental light of their otherwise bare cabin. 

Breaking through the tan of her skin, like a foreboding mountain ridge, was a scar, maybe ten inches in length. It danced from the back of her wrist to her forearm, blotchy and dense in its complexion, weaving its way from one side of her arm to the other, before narrowing a little, and twisting once again until it coalesced with the wrinkled skin of her elbow. The helix pattern was almost similar to that of delicately manicured ivy found around an old church spire, or wisteria on a proud house owner’s front porch Yet the brutality of the cut was obvious to any semi-competent observer. Aurora would often self-consciously rub her right hand against it, as if remembering the fire and claw that had left its mark on her and wanting to futilely attempt to soothe the skin back into its original place. 

“I wish I could say it looks worse than it was,” muttered Aurora blackly, as Theo gaped at it with an element of awe, his face widening in surprise.

“I never knew it was so big. What happened?” he said.

He took off his glasses and gave them a wipe before placing them inches from the cut, using them like a magnifying glass. 

“Chinese Fireball," explained Aurora. 

Theo let out a low whistle, “Dangerous beasts to tease.”

“We bit off more than we could chew”.

“Clearly,” laughed Theo. 

“I nearly lost the arm, you know,” said Aurora, a little ruefully at her own idiocy. 

“I don’t remember…”

“Before you arrived, one of the first tombs we excavated."

“Hell. We all knew that Lucy Sharpe was far too arrogant for this line of work…should have stuck to the books rather than jollying up the Yangtze for a spot of curse-breaking?”

“Wasn’t her fault. Not that time. Are you sure I have never mentioned all this before?”

“No. I saw it every day for the past ten months, but, I never really found the right time to ask.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.”

Though as Aurora said this she was eager to move the conversation on, it was embarrassing to be reminded of her own mistakes - a hangover effect of being born in a country that wonderfully mixed emotional restraint with self-loathing. 

“Oh that’s good. I was worried it might have been an awkward case of childhood trauma," babbled Theo, "or, I don’t know, dabbling in black market floo powder. It felt wrong to ask.”

“Well, this time,” said Aurora, after a pause and smirking out of exasperation, aware that she would need to give him something to end this grim verbal sojourn, “it was largely my own fault. All I will say is when a wizard emperor’s tomb warns you of curses and fire reigning down upon thieves; don’t take it as a metaphor."

“It could have been a good addition to my notes, you know.”

“Think you have enough for an article?”

“In the Prophet? Maybe. Though I dare say they won’t give it the column inches I’d wish for.”

“They gave it to you last time.”

Theo shrugged, “They took my monthly reports. You see, it’s all well and good for them to pick up my cheery news about wizarding discoveries, to counter the gloom. But an in-depth piece? They care more about what colour the Happy Grindylows lead singer has dyed his hair, or what some suit like Barty Crouch is hoping to reform than giving me the room I need. They need short, obvious, beaming news. The stuff people can glance through in the morning and not feel someone will curse the head off their shoulders when they jaunt off to Flourish & Blotts. They don’t care about what you all found out there.”

“Nice to know we’re appreciated,” replied Aurora blackly. 

She then looked out the window and tried to get a proper glimpse of the weather outside. 

Sadly, its presence could only be felt through her magical intuition, as when she had earlier attempted to discern anything outside her window, she was offered only an unflattering reflection of their travel-worn, flustered faces cast by the dingy light of their cabin.

Theo meanwhile, was still marching on with the conversation.

“I suppose it might get a good bit of space in The Traveller or in one of the Luxembourg magazines. They have a much keener interest in our wider history than we seem to do, though I am hardly looking at a trove of Galleons, just enough to cover these expenses.”

“It’s a weird world.”

“Especially now. As I said people want easy distractions. They want good news, but unconditional good news only. Certainly, they don’t want their world challenged. If you’d stayed there for another decade, with some of the things you saw over there Aurora, you could have been famous.”

“Hmm….”

Hoping that Theo had now stopped with his inquiries for good, she rubbed her scar once more before concealing it again behind the welcoming warmth of her coat. Then she turned back to the letters, with one eye on to the storm brewing only millimetres away from them, a storm they were separated from by only a worryingly thin sheet of steel.

She attempted to create a lull in conversation long enough to establish a firm silence. She was tired of talking, it distracted her from all the words she had been running over in her mind, the written words that she had been tracking each syllable of in her brain. After weeks of journeying, she really couldn’t stand another one of Dr Theodore Morgan’s long, winding conversations. 

What could she have expected though? 

He was a journalist, whom since he had arrived in the Far East had worn a suit of elaborate tweed. Perhaps done so to match a considerably more elaborate white, twirled moustache. 

Theo had become a welcome addition to their team of curse-breakers, his writing was a sort of seal-of-approval on the importance of their work. Armed with a chimaera-fur pen and a pile of beeswax tablets, his off-the-wall manner had been a boon to the entire expedition. His bouncy personality and easy charisma as he examined the findings of the team she worked under was such a marked contrast to the usual inspectors of their hauls. That being the dry, uptight little goblins, delegated on behalf of Gringotts to run a rather caustic, myopic eye over all of their efforts. Interested only in the finances, the miasma of monetary prudence would linger long after they returned home, their bitter, pedantic complaints buffering any of the more viscerally imagined plans for further exploration. 

Mostly though, she was flattered at how he had taken a shine to her. 

His complimentary comments had rubbed off on Aurora like indulgent treacle. Unthreatening and mostly of the bumbling variety, his connections with the most foreign of wizarding regions, alongside his knack for knowing a good story to write about made him good company most of the time. As ageing former academics approaching their seventies and the twilight years of his journalism career go, he was the best. Unfortunately, he was more of a nuisance in these bleaker days. Offering out of courtesy and out of a begrudging realisation that he ought to see his daughter once in a while, he had come back with Aurora, all the way from the coasts off the South China Sea.

Frankly, he didn’t understand why she was going home with such worry and trepidation. He recognised why she was sad, both at going back to a world she was so happy to leave and in doing so in such morose circumstances, but he did not connect the dots the same way she had done. He thought she may have been tearful and full of sorrow, but her attitude of constant alertness and uptight curiosity had puzzled the ageing scribe. 

Then again, he always understood adventures more than he got people; he expected it was just one of those woman things. Countering it all with a cheery demeanour that was becoming abrasive to Aurora, conversations had become more strained.

As irritating as she was now finding the man, and his Cheshire cat grin, that stretched across his face, flaunting the remaining vestiges of his former good looks of yesteryear, she was above all mad at herself.

She was furious for not recognising the signs before she left. Things had been slowly changing, and until now, she had been too oblivious to their significance. 

The scroll, by courier, arrived from the Office of Wizarding Inheritance. 

It had notified her of her brother’s death, and had given her a dryly prescribed set of galleons. She read the two-line piece in a tent in China, whilst partially high on mandrake fumes. At the time, she had assumed it was part of a bad hallucination. When she awoke the next day however, and re-read it, any suggestion of it being a construct in an artificial nightmare was duly dismissed. The bubbling sense of optimism that had consumed her for the past few months had swept away from her like dry autumn leaves before a storm. She had nearly fainted. The breath had sucked out of her, her heart stopping. 

After regaining composure, she felt it must have been a mistake.

But then the owls came.

Her family had sent letters confirming the news, yet they lacked their usual warmth or charm. There was no obvious invitation in any of the letters for her to come home, no sign of their grief, and no explanation about what happened. She was left with only the Ministry explanation: which was that there was none. 

Unsure of what to do, she had rocked in her tent for hours, between wretched bouts of tears. Her friends had tried to console her, but she was short with them. Knowing she had to do something, she left in a day, desiring nothing more than to return home. 

She left the morning after staying at a nearby brothel, wanting to simply be held by someone who could only be there for her needs, even during a passionless tryst. Hopping onto an oncoming freight train, she left the land that had filled with her such adventure and discovery far behind, sure never to see it again, taking Theo only at his relentless insistence. 

Her brother, Rupert Meadows, was two years her junior. Possessing an overpowering sense of purpose, he had left Hogwarts with flying grades to a career in the Magical Law Department. Following the footsteps of their father, and staying home in a country that Aurora normally found insufferable, he had embraced the tedium of wizard life in the late sixties. He had taken the sudden rise in disturbances and deaths of the seventies as a great evil to be overpowered.

Certainly he had made her estranged, rift-ridden family proud. What he had also done, though, was given certain people more reason to hate them.

As pure-bloods who had washed away their old prestige line, the Nelson name, only a few decades ago, she felt that he was playing a stupid risk. Firstly, marrying a muggle, and then fighting against thugs whom had the sympathies of people that despised them.

On her journey back, she had carried every letter she had received from home on her in person. All the messages came back with her: from her bitterly isolated mother, from her continuously upbeat brother, and from her flustered big-wig dad in the upper echelons of the ministry. His prose as lively as always.

It was all her correspondence from the last four years, having severed her other ties with her former life in the British wizarding world. It included the letters bemoaning the Christmases she missed, and the ones displaying beamingly positively feelings towards her minor fame from the reports of their discoveries in the Prophet (which seldom noted her directly). Also party to the pile were notes that expressed their confused attitude to her reckless decision to abandon them to be, in their minds, a make-believe swashbuckling pirate playing in caves. 

Scanning each of their letters for more information, convinced they may have left some sort of code of in the letters, a few tears ran down her cheek when she laughed at one of her brother’s meta-jokes.

He didn’t reveal much about his work, but only now, when fully paying attention did she realised that with each letter the development of his career got darker his feelings towards it more confused. She had not paid attention properly before, but now saw through his tone that things had been graver than she had realised for quite some time.  
She was guilty: both of not protecting him, and of belittling his choices. She had not normally subscribed to his moral assertions over good and bad. 

She even paid little or no attention to that muggle wife, whom passed away only a year before. Was her name Tracey? Or Stacey? She hadn’t even gone to the funeral. 

When he wrote in his letter of an accident, had she taken it at face value to soon? When she had queried it, he didn’t properly respond. 

For her, his work was a little too noble, catching criminals. He was in the position of a glorified official, whom enjoyed the office too much to be an auror. Whenever he recalled memories of their childhood in his letters, however, such as when they fell into a pond after pushing too hard on a swing, none of their differences mattered. She always smiled with such childlike innocence. Knowing he would never recall their childhood to her again filled her with a consuming emptiness that was difficult to shake off. It was only combatted by her determination to make things right. 

To her annoyance, Theo began to chunter away once again.

“The one thing I never missed about this place was the weather you know….”

“Do you think I was wrong to return home?” said Aurora, she wanted to cut through the chaff of Theo’s musings.

“No, I understand completely. I have a family too. I am just not sure it’s all as suspicious as you think it is.”

She remained unconvinced. 

Their train meanwhile, was one of the rickety, unimaginative variety.

It was stalely furnished in brutal upholstery, upholstery that contrasted pointedly with the rather arresting array of muggle attire, their fashions and types. In Aurora’s view, this was the real first instance of muggle clothing being as bizarre as the robes and hats of the more conventional witch and wizard. 

The locomotive was a stopping service, delayed, and operating graveyard slots on a soullessly cold night. It was heading from Dover to her home in the depths of the West Country. 

Or indirectly at least, as Aurora had been commuting the last leg of her return from Asia as inconspicuously as she could, trying hard to blend into muggle society. She had used the muggle transport networks, and had become increasingly irritated that Theo’s eccentric haircut and loud, carrying tones had really made it difficult for her to remain undetected in his company. She planned on heading off the train later that night as it sleepily pulled in to Bristol, hoping to call a cab (a vehicle she had travelled in far more regularly than others of her kind) to take her to leafy, capricious village of Wavelock. From there, she would walk the last mile or so to the family manor concealed in the hills above.

Though her plans were still up in the air, as the storm they were pushing through was abnormally turbulent. The rain was merciless, rattling off the walls of their cabin like stones off a tin roof, and the ghostly whistle of the wind indicated a tempest evening of severe thunder and lightning was on its way before their journey’s end. 

Bored of twiddling his thumbs as their conversation had faded into obscurity once again, Theo swept up an errant series of leaflets off the floor with a flick of his wand and took to reading them instead. He attempted to discern the meaning of the colourful array of Japanese letters. 

“Careful with that magic!” Aurora hissed, 

She had suddenly sat bolt upright, darting her eyes across the confined space, before turning towards the rattling door of their cabin. She furtively glanced at the corridor beyond, still smothered in the darkness of an unforgiving winter’s night, their train carriage rocking ever so slightly in the arms of a virulent storm.

Satisfied that nothing had changed, she went back to her letters. Theo, meanwhile, continued his efforts at blending in with Muggle normalcy in vain. The cabin was empty apart from them, and he, portly in build and sitting unconvincingly in wide-fitting jeans and a zip-up fleece, remained very conspicuous. This was largely due to his penchant for fondling his moustache, which he twirled in elaborate hoops. Their presence remaining even after Aurora’s initial insistence that he shaved it off. 

He hummed a tune as he read through the newly-found collection of junk flyers. 

They were all that furnished the cabin. A pile of these flyers had been left on the floor, in a language she recognised, as if a cruel, taunting reminder of what she had left to reach her. 

So far, only their cabin was occupied in the carriage, with most people sitting further up, closer to the driver, in the more comfortable seats near the front. Aurora had chosen these seats meanwhile, to ensure they could talk in confidence if Theo insisted on chatter. Which, he duly had. 

Aurora dropped her shoulders and tried to relax once more - or at least tried to attempt to relax once more. She had been failing in her efforts to stay calm for the entire length of this sorry, delayed, three hour journey. 

“There’s no one out there you know, to hear us,” said Theo, grinning, “must be half-empty this train, and besides, we checked, this whole carriage is practically motionless, even the flies are dead." 

He noted this whilst gesturing towards what looked like a mass grave of insects on the window sill, party amongst stubbed cigarettes and balls of used chewing gum. Smiling, he blackly pointed out the gormless selection of arthropods that had trapped themselves in the dim powered bulbs of their cabin - perhaps entranced by the seduction of its warmth and glow in the barrenness of a privately-financed cross-country train interior. His deep chuckle did nothing to break Aurora’s frosty exterior, the lines of her face wrought with undue tension. 

“Doesn’t mean we should be complacent,” Aurora replied, whom had pointedly ignored any moment of comic relief for the past few days of travelling, even the tasteless sort that she normally loved. 

Standing up with a silent groan, and clutching the base of her back she said, “I hate these seats, they’re so hard."

“This was all your idea, you even said no to cushioning charms," Theo pointed out.

“I know, I know,” said Aurora, dismissively shaking off Theo’s laid back smugness with a flick of her hand. “I just wish this door would properly shut."

She clasped her hands around the door handle.

“I just wish this train wasn’t so bloody slow,” Theo remarked. 

“We already went through this,” Aurora replied with a deep sigh, “I don’t trust your Portkeys and this is not the weather for flying”.

“Just because of that faulty one in Croatia?”

“We ended up in the sea!” 

“It would beat this still, surely?”

“You didn’t have to come.” 

“What’s wrong with the Floo Network or Apparition?”

“Look, I just…just….Something feels wrong okay? I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want to travel like a witch right now.”

“Why not? I am sure that in the wizarding community, with the news you have had, the only reaction anyone will have is that of sympathy?”

“I just said. Something doesn’t seem right.”

“This isn’t even the quickest Muggle way home, I hear they have some pretty smooth, and clean may I add, trains apart from this one,” he said, somewhat irritated, but largely still amused. His round belly shuddered a little as he let out a deep chuckle. 

“I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, going this way around makes it easier to get home unnoticed."

“Oh my,” rasped Theo, “this is futile.”

“You didn’t have to come!”

Theo let out another sigh.

This only irritated Aurora further, as she fiddled with the door mechanism.

“What was it they announced? With the weather outside, they are operating on reduced power”.

“I don’t know, couldn’t get past the Irish accent.”

“He was East Anglian!”

“Well, didn’t understand it.”

“Okay then, let me repeat – that is what he said.”

“So, the train is reduced to snail’s speed, and we now also must wallow like flobberworms in semi-darkness. At least they apologised for it I suppose.” 

Theo was now reading a flyer about a canned Asian soda drink.

“Oh you don’t know Muggles like I do,” Aurora said, still wrenching at the unresponsive door, her teeth bared in a grimace of frustration. “One, they are always polite. Two, they never mean it. They are the masters of polite insincerity; they have a business apology manufactured down to a tee”. 

She wrenched at it again, almost pulling it from the pane of plastic glass it was attached to. The door then momentarily found the catch, and slid into the lock, enclosing the space and seamlessly bringing continuity to the composite décor of middle-fare travel, before the falling back against the frame. Once more, it proceeded to rattling open and shut in tandem with the turbulence ruminating from the tracks below. It opened and shut several more times before Aurora, checking the corridor for suspicious sounds, her wand concealed in her sleeve, turned to sit back down, flustered and despondent.

“I don’t know, Aurora,” said Theo, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a ballpoint pen, “I have never been ever more fascinated with your kind”

“They’re not my kind, I have one aunt who is a Muggle and that’s it. Besides, I don’t love them, I mean what is it with these ridiculous doors?” asked Aurora. 

“Beats me,” shrugged Theo.

After that, Aurora went back to flicking through her pages, studying the patterns in the calligraphy, just trying to see if the penmanship was forced. It was definitely their writing, but that was all she could tell.

“I believe a lot of it you know,” said Theo, matter-of-factly. “When I came from India to meet you, my contacts all talked of the disturbances. Of muggle killings, of reports of discrimination against muggle-borns, and I even heard rumblings that people wanted to break the stature of secrecy. But this wizard, the one they are rallying behind, he must have an angle. A bad angle, but surely he can be deal with, bargained off at the worst.”

“I don’t know,” she said, surprised to find this conversation had the effect of rousing her more than his more recent anodyne fare. “Whenever I think….you know, of the one they call You-Know-Who....whenever I think of what the few papers have implied beneath their panicked hysteria…..I go numb. He has an army under his employ. Talk of inferi, giants, dementors, a Ministry gone rogue, werewolves even….”

“Nonsense. No chance they can all band together. I reckon a lot of this has been over-egged. These fellows they call Death Eaters sound a nasty piece of work though.”

“I don’t think they can be reasoned with.”

“So that’s why you’ve return home?”

“My brother is dead. That is why I returned home.”

“I am sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Just saying, you back to fight the one they call You-Know-Who at the centre of it all. You think it will end in all –out-war. Everyone is after something, aren’t they?”

“Look at what they want, though? Last week they apparently flayed a family of muggles. Six of them! Something the Prophet kept damn quiet. I had to hear it off Ern!"

“I think he was more shocked at you rejecting his services for a muggle bus.”

“I didn’t tell him what I was doing. Besides, that’s not the point. Through omission, they have built a fear around this You-Know-Who. Even if none of what they say is true, the fact that people are saying it, is enough of a statement in itself.”

“You’re thinking very forensically.”

“I have learnt to.”

“Still, I think you are looking to far into it. What happened to your brother is a tragedy, but I am sure that this grim news aside, your family are fine.”

“You don’t think there is a chance he has infiltrated the Ministry?”

“No, but the Ministry may be playing hush-hush with the Prophet. Like I said before: Good news only etc etc.”

Aurora shook her head, "When I left straight from Hogwarts, I remember reading of an escaped werewolf and a few funny deaths. I didn’t expect it to turn how it has though. I have read all I can on the way here, spoke to wizards too petrified to go into full details, even hundreds of miles off the British Isles, and yet only when coming here do I sense the real fear. It has leaked into the muggle world, Theo. Unheard of mists, those deaths I mentioned, mad ministers in the cabinet office. I mean I am even pretty suspicious of this ridiculous storm.”

“Don’t be like that, it is approaching winter here after all,” he replied, in a fashion meant to be reassuring. 

There was another break in the conversation, before the train pulled into what was supposed to be the final stop before Bristol. Here, there was a larger crowd of muggles. Some were dressed in rather unusual depictions of monsters and ghouls, heading off to a premature Halloween party in the city, no doubt. They waddled on, boozy and conversational. Thankfully, they made their way to the front of the train, and away from Aurora, sitting right at the back in Carriage F where their alcoholic miasma would have been abrasive to her senses. She was amused however, at some of the others getting on board. They seemed of a more eclectic variety, their fashion choices as bizarre in her view as the costume revellers whom were frolicking in the odd muggle depictions of the magical, supernatural world. Some had flared trousers, big circular belts, and all of the men under thirty had hair almost as long as hers, and as bushy as the ears of a poodle. 

The train’s attendance doubled with their arrival.

Though most stayed away, two arrived in their cabin, and, bizarrely, sat either side of her. Flummoxed, but not wanting to be rude, she quickly hid her letters and stayed between them like the filling in a sandwich. Theo sniggered at her and gave a look of baffled bemusement. They didn’t belong to the broad groups of revellers and oddly dressed wayfarers, and instead were both of a pensioner age, with similar perms and wide girths. After a moment she realised they must have fallen out, and rather than sit separately, they had sat either side of a stranger to somehow emphasise the rift. 

Muggle behaviour was very strange sometimes, thought Aurora.

Then a man carrying a frightened girl whom was scared of the thunder, came in.

He explained she didn’t like being alone with weather like that, and that they were only on this train because his divorced wife insisted on having her back for the weekend. The rumbles of thunder made the little girl, blonde haired, and wearing a drench yellow mac, tremble. Though she clearly took a shine to Aurora. As she sat opposite her, she would open her mouth into a smile as curved as a banana every time their eyes met. 

As the train chugged on, Aurora headed off to the bathroom. Located near the front of the train, she walked through the corridors, hearing only murmurings from most cabins of the half-empty vehicle. She then, however, reached the Carriage B, which was largely occupied by the drunken revellers. 

Ignoring their leery catcalls and boozed propositions, she marched briskly to the entrance of Carriage A. It was blocked by a guard, wearing a rail uniform a badge that said "Driver".

Carrying an odd-vacant expression, he said, “Sorry ma’am, the bar is closed and first class is off limits”.

“Looking for the toilet,” she replied.

“Oh, through there,” he said, drooling somewhat, pointing at a small door to his right.

The toilet was solitary, the size of a broom cupboard with a small washbasin and mirror. As she closed the door behind her, she paused for a moment. Something was off. Why was a driver guarding a door, and why was the door closed in the first place? The fact they were carrying on through the storm had tickled her suspicions and his behaviour, alongside the confused look on his face, unsettled her. 

Trying to bat these feelings away, she turned her gaze to the mirror, wanting to wipe the sweat and fluster from her face. To most people’s minds, she possessed a sort of unusual elfin beauty.

This came through even though her features had become increasingly travel-worn. Bags had formed under her eyes and her skin was warm and puffed from the commute.

Her looks otherwise remained unblemished. People in particular, were drawn to her eyes which, almost opaque in colouring, were of a very deep brown. They gave her a sobriety; an intense seriousness that betrayed her otherwise waifish looks. Her cheek bones were angular and almost delicate in their composition, whilst those serious eyes rested on skin only blemished by the cuts and bruises of her lifestyle. The muddy, inconsistent colour of her tan only managed to partially obscure the natural paleness of her complexion. Her hair, of an autumnal hue was wavy, straggly even towards the tips, in a way normally that was more natural on young children. Aurora's appearance, in her view, gave away her own very prominent insecurities. A rugged career path hiding a delicate being 

She was worried that it was all this was to do with fate. This could all be proof that as much as she tried to conceal it, she was naturally weak, a delicate person trying to live a lie. 

Returning to a cabin with a face clear from the fatigue of the past few weeks would probably confuse people to the point of suspicion. She also didn’t want to risk magic, of any kind, unless she really had to, in such a confined muggle space. So she stuck to just washing her face in the bowl. Futilely, she tried instead to wipe away those reoccurring insecurities that had troubled her the past few days with the tepid sink water. 

As she left she took another pause in the corridor, and studied the driver again. 

Deeply troubled to find him still drooling, she went back to her cabin very much on guard, with a hand permanently tucked in her chest pocket, grasping her wand.

Meanwhile, she listened out for the sounds of thunder. Sure enough, even over the sounds of their chatter emanating into the corridor, she could hear it corresponded too soon with the usual flashes of lightning.Were the people around her so oblivious? To her, it seemed unusual for the train to plough in with an obvious threat from the storm.

She tried to convince herself that it must have sounded worse in the carriages than it was. After all, she was still unable to see out the windows without using magic and drawing attention. So Aurora dutifully squeezed herself back between the two wobbly octogenarians, and nestled into her seat. Resilient in her efforts not to get out the letters, she chose to wait it out. After all, they would be arriving in Bristol within an hour. Thankfully, her willpower was in no need of testing, as it would have been awkward to take out all the letters they remained stowed away above her head. Theo, next to the father whom was now listening to an audio cassette, had actually drifted off to sleep.

To her surprise, a trolley even went past but when she discovered they were out of tea of all things, she calmly let it walk on by. She sat there in painful silence.

After a while however, it came impossible not to think about her brother again.

She had let him down, she had failed him.

She hadn’t been there for him like she needed to have been. Not that he was plagued by problems, but she had let the familial bond slip away. Now though, as he wasn’t there to see it, she had a determination to do him justice, if justice needed to be done. It was a hunch, an emotive pull that she hadn’t felt bother her for a long time. Everything she had read in the letters, however slight, confirmed those feelings.

Aurora was awoken from her pitiful intellectual stupor by murmurs of dissent had begun to echo around the carriage. Complaints, she imagined, that were mirrored further along the train. The storm was getting worse and worse, and after an hour, the train showed no sign of stopping, even when the announcer called that they pulling into Bristol. 

Unable to make sense of this, this state of uncertainty was interrupted by the arrival of another man at their cabin door.

Dark clothed and sunken eyed, he pressed his face against their cabin. With his gaunt cheeks and greasy golden locks, Aurora assumed he may have been a homeless man, searching the train for spare change.

“What’s he up to?” murmured the flabby woman to her right.

Then, before they had reached a decision on what to do next, he slid open the door himself, momentarily moving it from its rattling indent. As it swung back into its knocking rut, he took another step into the carriage and bent down. His face loomed feet away from the young girl in a now-dried yellow mac, sucking on a lollipop.

“Hello,” he said in a cheery whisper to her, “whom might you be?”

The father had taken off his headphones and looked thoroughly appalled.

Eyes narrowing; he took his daughter under one arm and said, “I don’t believe that’s any concern of yours."

“Oh but I so wish it to be,” he smiled, licking his lips, exposing unusually pronounced canines.

Set on edge, Aurora clutched the wand in her chest pocket, ready to strike out if he moved another inch towards the little girl. The child was still gazing at him with a look of oblivious curiosity.

The women either side of her were shuffling very uncomfortably. Theo meanwhile, she saw, had just woken up, and looked at the scene with a face of bereft understanding and confusion.

“Get out of here!” shouted the man.

Ignoring the father’s protestations, he pulled the head of a rose from his pocket. He twirled it in his fingers like a country showman, before dropping it on the girl’s lap.

“It’s for you,” he said, “something to remember me by once the show is over.”

Then he stood up craned his neck back. With a fierce growl, he stretched out his arms - his sharp, undercut nails flashing in a bout of ill-timed lightning.

He threw himself at the little girl, whom leapt away from him with a cry of terror. Pulling out her wand, Aurora was fractions of seconds from aiming a spell, dropping any notion of the statute of secrecy, hoping to curse the wolfish man to infinity.

Theo however, was quicker to the draw, and shouted “Stupefy!"

The spell missed, but the blast of red air was enough to put the man off his stride.

At the arrival of incomprehensible words and flashes of light, she heard doors crash open from cabins nearby.

The women either side of Aurora, meanwhile, made a whinnying sound, like a spooked horse, traumatised by the power coming from what looked to them like a drumstick.

Growling in frustration, the man then rummaged through his dank, grey cardigan and pulled out his own wand.

As if more frightened by the emergence of another stick of wood, rather than his grisly advances, the women shrank back into their seats. The father and daughter, meanwhile, embraced in a tight ball on the floor.

“Expelliarmus!" Aurora bellowed, as he began to open his mouth for a spell.

She shot the charm with such venom that it split his wand in two, snapping from the force of her incantation.

Yelling in rage, he then turned to Theo and took a swipe at him.

Theo, with surprising strength for an older gentleman, caught his wrist and tried to wrestle him to the floor. After a moment in staggered limbo, they fell to the ground, grappling across the carpet.

Aurora attempted to help in some tangible way with her wand, but was unable to aim at the brute. His body was hard to decipher, stuck under Theo’s great stomach, as their tangle of limbs wrestled for supremacy.

Perhaps hoping to be a saviour out the blue, the father regained some composure and said, “Never my daughter you foul monster!”

He jumped into the furore, fighting with Theo against the attacker.

Then a second later, she saw Theo tumble out of the fray, wounded by a kick.

His wand fell to the ground. 

Laughing comically, the sharp-toothed man struck the father across the face, knocking him out in a single punch.

“Daddy!” shouted the girl, in the raw throated yell of a child.

Through the commotion, a crowd of people had congregates in in the corridor outside. Nearly all of them stayed back, mouths open in shock at the scenes. Only one, of a burlier formation, attempted to wade into the chaos.

Seeing what happened to the most recent non-magic intervener, she turned with her wand and said “No!”

Aurora had been a little too strong in her reactions however. Rather than knocking him back a few feet, her spell stunned him and he fell back into the corridor, through the ajar cabin door. This only heightened the panicked delirium of the muggle audience. Catching his fallen body, a friend of his from the crowd screamed, “You bitch!” before dragging him away.

The other bystanders fled back across the corridor. They ran, their screams dictating the pace of their footsteps with their hands over their heads in. In desperation, they were looking for somewhere to hide, perhaps fearing it was a gunman or an attempted robbery, obviously unprepared to accept the notion of magic.

Aurora then turned to the man with her wand, incandescent with rage. Through taking the time to stop other muggles entering the chaos, however, she had given him a split-second advantage.

As she pointed her wand, he shoved Aurora to the ground and then took another swipe at Theo. All the while, the two elderly women stayed where they were, paralysed by fear.

His nails cut Theo across the chin, who grunted in pain. He then aimed a second blow at him as blood dribbled down Theo's jaw. He missed by a few inches. 

Not enjoying much luck, the hollow sound of metal reverberated around the cabin like an out of tune xylophone. 

Theo, as he had dodged the man, had leapt backwards and collided head first with the steel bar of the overhead storage locker. He crumpled, and lay on the ground in an identical pose to the father, completely motionless. 

As the man went once more for the girl, Aurora jumped in between them, pushing the man back. He stumbled backwards, giving her enough room to put her wand to chest height and shout “Depulso!”

As if a ball of air had emerged between the two of them, he flew out the cabin door and knocked against the corridor wall. 

Stopping for breath, Aurora turned to petrified girl. Attempting to reassure the girl by gently squeezing her wrist she gave her a warm smile. After a moment, in a stuttered tone, she murmured “Thank you” and gave her the rose that the man had given her earlier in an attempted sick joke. 

Tucking it away in her pocket, she went out into the corridor and inspected his startled body. The blow should have thrown him through the cabin opposite and out of the train itself, though to her surprise, it had stopped at the flimsy structure of the cabin wall.

She turned over the man’s body, and noticed the dark hairs running down his spine. His eyes were of a milky hue, similar to those a creature she had studied at Hogwarts years before.

“Werewolves,” she muttered, astonished, under her breath. Semi-formed and attacking a muggle train two weeks before full moon.

Shocked by the revelation, she didn’t notice that the other passengers on her carriage had emerged from their cabins, hearing the commotion.

I suspect the ministry will be here soon, she thought, reassuringly. They will sort out this mess.

Ignoring a couple of gobsmacked muggles whom had once more gathered again in the corridor, she went back into her cabin and checked Theo’s pulse, then the father’s. They were both going to be okay.


	2. Into the Void

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cast into a fight she didn't choose, and brought back to a society changed beyond recognition, Aurora has no choice but to take on the werewolves herself.

As her breath returned to its former complacent ease, a shadow obscured the light of the corridor, looming over the threshold of the carriage.

Aurora turned to the entrace of Carriage F and saw a tall man, hooded in a dark top, enter the corridor. His abnormally long nails brushed the frame of the door as he moved across the hall. Face hidden beneath the deep rim of his attire, his presence felt unusually imposing. 

To her surprise then, when he spotted Aurora crouched down by the concussed body of his lycanthropic friend, his body froze rigid - almost comically so. 

With a gasp, he leapt in the air, and turned on his heel and fled. 

Without a moment’s hesitation, she chased after him.

She pushed through into Carriage E, which was suspiciously empty. Carriage D came next, likewise lifeless, before she arrived in Carriage C, where that she saw the trap laid in front of her. 

It was almost as silent as Carriage E, but as she hurtled across the entrance, she could hear the mild, whimpering sounds of fear emanting across one side of the corridor. The noise as regular as the frantic pace of Aurora's heartbeat.

Muggles had been lined up, on the floor, against one of the rattiling carriage walls.

Mouths sealed shut, as if magically clamped, their eyes betrayed their true sense of terror. The erratic kinetic energy of their pupils which darted from Aurora to the brutish men that had taken them betrayed their sense of disbelief from the entire situation. As if it were almost a bad dream.

They were even all still rocking their unusual attire, some even sporting jackets of pink felt and leopard print, which added a grotesque sense of jazzy merriment to the tension.

Seeing this Aurora broke to a stop, stumbling on the ruff of the carpet. 

In front of her a grisly captor patrolled these thirty or so muggles, probably all the passengers from the front four carriages of the half-empty train. He was topless and as skinny as a summer starved tree. His bones covering a bare frame that seemed deprived of muscular development. He exchanged a few mutters of triumph with the man who had just ran from Aurora in in over-dramatic fear. The success of his ruse had prompted him to chuckle to himself under the confines of his hood. Meanwhile, another associate, a fourth member of this gang, leapt out from one of the cabins. He had been waiting for Aurora, and pointed his wand at her, shouting, “Stupefy”.

Aurora cursed her idiocy.

They must have heard the struggle at the back of the train and had succesfully lured her out like a rat from a sinking ship.

She was lucky that, as he aimed, he had also stumbled in his stride like she had. Aurora was a sitting duck, but he missed, losing his footing on the carpet fabric.

The under-investment in rail now proving a fortuante blessing, the spell whooshed over her head. Realising her luck, she thought the word “Protego!” as quick as she could. A second cry of “Stupefy" had come from the werewolves in front of her. Blocking the spell, she then wordlessly flicked off their continuing curses with ease. The first fight had been a confusing affair where she hadn’t done her magical abilities justice. This time, her adept skill with a wand came to the fore as she continued to bat away the hexes of the three men. The looks of glee exchanged by the three hostage-taking werewolves began to recede from their gaunt faces.

Sensing the mismatch, the hooded runner ducked for cover, and pulled out an antique tube of swirling black fog from his dark sweatshirt. Before Aurora could move on to the offensive, he threw it against the ground.

It smashed.

Fog crept out from glass, leaving black lines in the air.

There were cries of shock from the line of hostages on the floor, their hysteric sounds breaking through the clenched teeth. The other hooded man growled in frustration, clearly that wasn’t part of the plan. He pushed his glass smashing colleague to the ground, and ran off into Carriage B, his topless friend following up in the rear.

The fog travelled quickly, and soon the carriage was filling with black mist. She could deduce it was not toxic, but instead some sort of device meant to create instant darkness. The muggles weren’t to know this however, and screamed through their clamped jaws.

Muttering a counter curse, which released their chin with an awkwardly humorous sound of popped air, she said to them all, “Go, now! Through that door!”

She pointed at the entrance to Carriage D.

Duly released, most left in a panicked hurry as soon as they could, making no effort to take their things as the room filled with mist. Some squealed at the sounds of thunder, which rumbled on even louder than before outside. To her fortune, the abandoned werewolf was painfully trampled on by the onrushing feet of hysterical muggles. The knee of a befuddled octogenarian in particular, caused a significant blow as it collided loudly with his temple.

After waiting for the last muggle to leave, which fortunately happened just as the mist was reaching the door of Carriage D, she sealed it with a powerful locking enchantment.

This scared a few of the travellers, who banged against the entrance, and also angered a few others who had changed their mind and wanted to play the role of a hero. They protested about being shut away, some wanted to speak to the driver, others cried that she was a coward, whilst one or two were naively convinced they could help.

She ignored their calls, shaken after witnessing the galling scene of that father being swept away by the werewolf like a fallen leaf in a storm. Another family like hers could have been torn apart in one ill-advised moment. 

Thankfully, her charm worked, the creeping fog stopped at the locked threshold, unable to make further headway. Meanwhile, the heavily bruised werewolf on the floor, made an effort to get up and got as far as the sitting position before Aurora pointed her wand and said “Corprius”.

The werewolf remained on the ground, but was now hunched awkwardly, panting in the emerging darkness as Aurora wiped sweat off of her brow. He was restrained by the power of her magic and though he tried to stand up a couple of times, he eventually gave in.

After letting out a wolfish keen, he locked eyes with Aurora. 

She took the time to regain her breath whilst the fog turned the carriage pitch dark, only the storm broke through its smothering blackness. The only glimmer of light, aside from the semi-regular flashes of lightning, was his vividly colourful pupils, following the brown hue of Aurora’s as she circled her floored opponent. 

Her mind continued to race. A thought dawned on here, a hysteric one.

Maybe they were after her? She was returning with an insistent belief that something was off, that her brother’s death wasn’t an accident after all. The troubled times were changing everything. Perhaps the Ministry were wilfully turning a blind eye. Her father remained a thorn in the side of many of them. Her brother meanwhile always never accepted no for an answer.

Knowing she needed answers she turned to him and said “What are you?” 

“What do you think?” 

“A werewolf. Operating out of full moon. Killing out of your own volition.” 

“I want for blood. So does the rest of my kin.”

“Why are you here?” 

“As I just said, for the blood"

“Do you know who I am?"

“How would I possibly know?”

“I am asking the questions, beast. What was in the tube?”

“An old recipe, from an old source, it turns everything into night. Brewed correctly it turns us into true beasts”

“You don’t look it to me.”

“We didn’t buy from the best.”

“So the lightning still comes through the darkness, and you remain as pathetic as you normally .”

“Well, it caused enough panic didn’t it? I wouldn’t underestimate us if I were you.”

“Why? Do you know the Death Eaters? Are you fighting for You-Know-Who.”

“He may like to think so, but I fight for me and me alone.”

“Why pick this train? What has happened to the Ministry? Why aren’t they here?”

“Beats me.”

“Tell me! Now! Where are they?”

“Maybe they don’t care for helpless little muggles, and whiny bitches like you!”

She slashed his cheek in a rage, her wand cutting the air like a hot knife. She heard his blood splatter the wall of the carriage. The werewolf laughed.

His reaction broke her cool.

She was stuck on a train, heading into a storm with werewolves, on her way back home to the funeral of her brother, whom she had let down and not spoken to for years. His death was suspicious, and the world around her had changed beyond any recognition since she had left.

The wonder of the past few years had been replaced by a growing trauma as her family disintegrating and dark wizards broke up the world that was so integral to her identity. She openly let out a few hiccoughing gasps of air, breathing heavily in a rage, before she slashed at his cheek again and again. The man continued to laugh and more blood hit the walls and ran down to the floor. 

Worst of all the Ministry weren’t here, and it didn’t matter if it was incompetency, corruption or worse, she was completely alone to face it all. 

Hoping to intimidate him she then turned to the carriage wall and said “Expulso”. 

Aurora hoped her spell would to break through the wall, potentially blowing away the fog with the stormy sky outside. When the spell fired from her wand the wall vibrated, but it did not rip open. Remarking on her failure, the werewolf bared his teeth in delight. .

“That won’t work sunshine” pausing for breath as he spat out blood. “Sure, perhaps a little thing might get out, like a stone, like a shoe maybe. But you’re sealed in. Unless you want to physically jump out the train of course! Give us all a good favour. Looks like we weren’t as weak as you thought, lollipop! The carriages are blast-proof and apparate-proof, so good luck darling!”

With a look of disgust, she made a lasso motion with her wand and from it emerged a yellow whip that fizzed through the dense mist.

Striking the beast in the face, he collapsed in a heap, his memory obliterated as he fell into a deep trance. Stupefying him afterwards for good measure, she then tried to think of a consistent way to light up the darkness surrounding her.

Before she made any further movements, she heard footsteps, forceful and hurried, clamber up the corridor in her direction. She could hear someone deeply inhaling, quickening his pace as he did so. Clearly he had smelt the blood 

Instinctively she darted into a cabin, thankful that in the pitch black, she had found one with an open door, rather than crashing foolishly into a glass wall. Tapping herself on the chest with her wand, she waited for the sensation of her body disappearing behind a disillusionment charm. The sensation, however, didn’t come. 

Convinced it was to do with the fog, she had no choice to lie still and hope the approaching figure didn’t spot her. She held her breath, lying on a bank of seats, as the figure reached where she had stood only moments before.

Looking down at the ground he said “Poor old Rufus”.

He tutted disapprovingly.

His voice was that of cut-glass Middle England, implanting an intelligence to his name that he clearly didn’t deserve. As he spied upon the concussed body that Aurora had just interrogated, his feet squelched beneath the blood on the floor. Turning to his left to admire the splatter on the wall, he said, “Is someone there?”

Pulling out his wand he cried, “Specialis Revelio”

Expecting to feel her body tingle as the spell alerted the man to her presence, Aurora had sat upright and pulled her wand from her pocket in preparation.

Fortunately, she was blessed enough to be dealing with a wizard who was less enamoured with wandlore than most others. A few sparks emitted from his wand, but no more, and immediately Aurora led down again, reassured by the matter. The figure, satisfied it meant no one was there said “I guess you butchered old Rufus and ran out that door!” 

He said it like an a-ha moment had dawned on him. Pointing at the door through to Carriage D, sealed to protect the muggles, he said “Alohomora”.

The door remained locked.

“Bollocks” muttered the figure. Trying the lock on the door again, he soon worked himself into a frenzy of frustration. Cursing and spitting, he yanked at the handle to Carriage D, before kicking and punching it in a rage.

Finally accepting that his magical skill was not up to the task, he turned on his heel and marched back to the carriages, calling out as he went “I think we have a problem here!”

Aurora beat her forehead in annoyance. She didn’t think the others would have been as stupid as Rufus, but clearly he was a livewire amongst the crowd.

She should have knocked the door-kicker out with a curse as he tried in vain to barge through, but due to the tension of the situation and the fact she could still see barely beyond her nose. She had played it too safe in her view. 

Even though, as she saw with the colour of her spell, the fog had an incomplete effect at subduing light, she needed night-vision to really go further.

She suspected that the other werewolves were back with the door-kicker up ahead, possibly shocked to find a wand carrier in and amongst their prey.

Their boldness had startled her, it was two weeks until full moon, and they didn’t seem particularly endowed with magical skill. Their savagery meanwhile repulsed her.

To try and rip apart hapless muggles on a train was a toxic blend of cowardice and butchery that revolted her to her very core.She knew that despite their incompetency, they could still kill plenty of the muggles cowering in the train behind her. She was the only person that could save them. 

Theo could at least reassure them. Somehow.

Clicking her fingers in a way similar to her a magician doing a magic trick, she whispered "Boreos".

The effect was instantaneous, her eyes were now tinted green with a charm. The darkness abated, and though the density of the fog remained, she could now decipher the outlines of the walls and see the detail of the floor a few feet in front of her. Of course she imagined the werewolves could see through the abyss with their keen bestial sight, but now partially she could too. 

It was a wandless spell. One that only worked if she clicked her fingers in time with the right syllable. There was no magic in a click, but it engaged her brain with the focus needed to get the required effect. She had made the spell herself. It had helped her find her way through several tombs and caves in the past.

Though she had showed it to impressed colleagues, they were unable to pull it off with any effect, even those whom had more experience and magical power than she probably did. 

Despite the adulation the spell received, Aurora felt it was an incomplete work. She was sure full vision could be achieved in magically induced darkness with a different incantation - one that shared the “oreos” ending maybe, but starting differently.

She regretted the fact that after creating the magic in fifth year at Hogwarts, she had not given herself the time to improve on it. Whatever the case, she now crept through the darkness with a sense of purpose, and towards the werewolves whom had fled into the dark. 

Their presence was still felt as she walked down the aisle, the smell of the werwolf's blood flecked on the wall nestled uncomfortably in Aurora’s mouth.

Thankful that her night vision gave her an outline of the walls and an almost pencilled, sketch of the abandoned clutter on the floor, including regretfully, some forgetful muggle’s diabetes medicine, she went to the door at the end, hearing voices filtering through from Carriage B.

Sliding the door open silently with her wand, she tip-toed a few steps and crouched behind an abandoned trolley of sugared treats and hot beverages.

The carriage was pitch black like Carriage C, suggesting the fog was unexpectedly sentient. It had turned from the entrance to Carriage D and had travelled in thick plumes to the front of the train.

From her position she could make out the voices as perfectly, there were two of them. Talking animatedly, they were probably sitting in a cabin at the other side of the carriage

“Seriously, what is happening here? Rufus and Red taken out and us stuck in the dark like rats! The boss said this would be a simple raid!” protested a voice at the far end of the room.

Its accent was thick cockney; the pitch was rather high for a man. 

“And so it has proved. See the Ministry anywhere?” replied a more calm tone, this one with an accent more common with Rufus', his voice also betraying a rich sense of entitlement and conceited arrogance. 

“Don’t lie to me, this has not gone well and you know it. And I bet the Ministry will be here if we don’t hurry up.”

“They have a lot on their plate, and stop pretending you didn’t know what you signed up for. We all thought that this would give us good practice. I want to be a beast out of full moon”

“So did I! But I didn’t know witches would be involved”

“Did you catch a look at her?”

“No.”

“Well, she’s really pretty. Gorgeous. Flowing hair. I want something like that. She can’t hide forever you know”

“Have them all for all I care! The Ministry could be here any minute. We better be off the train when they come.”

“We’ll see. You-Know-Who will hold them up for a while. We chose a good day for carnage.”

“Yes if we make it out alive!”

“Stop worrying, we have enough time to feast on a nice bit of prey”

“That witch is on board the train though!”

“We have teeth and claws; all she has is a bit of wood and a warm body I can feed off of.”

“Yeah, a body that she's probably hidden behind that magically sealed door. You can’t even break through it. You tried and failed.”

“Yes I failed! Alright?! But we have sealed the train. No one can apparate out and she seems like the worthy type for me. She might survive leaping off a speeding train but good luck convincing a herd of terrified muggles to do the same. The ball is in her court.”

“So what do we do?”

“We get the boss. He is dealing with our little issue up the front, and we make our way back to that bloody door by Carriage D again” 

“After you.”

They strode out into the corridor, the outline of their looming figures were just visible to her. 

She looked down at the wheel of the trolley.

With a wordless flick of her wand, she undid its footbrake.

Picking up speed, it practically flew down the hallway.

The chatting duo turned towards the noise of rattling metal, and with a gasp jumped to the side, clattering into the wall. The trolley missed them by fractions, and a heavy thud could be heard as one fell to the ground after trying to use the wall for support. Meanwhile the other kicked open a nearby door, cursing under his breath as leapt into a nearby cabin. 

Pointing at the ground, Aurora emerged from entrance and said “Stupefy”. 

She missed the fallen werewolf by a few feet. The spell hit the trolley instead, catapulting the kettle through a window, its silvery sheen flashing in the darkness. It smashed through the glass, finding a chink in the curse fog’s spell. Rainfall streamed into the corridor and wind gushed through the gap in the wall and circulated through the train, haunting their surroundings like a ghostly echo.

Getting back to his feet, the clumsier of the men flipped the trolley sideways, and used it as cover and aimed a green curse in Aurora’s direction. 

“Avada Kedavra” he shrieked hysterically. 

A diluted green spell shot against the door, missing Aurora as she darted into the nearby cabin for protection. It collided with a rack of travel magazines and dribbled down to the floor.

It was a weak-as-milk attempt at the killing curse, shot by a panicked imbecile clearly clutching at straws. Nonetheless, the nature of the spell and its use still alarmed her. 

After firing a few spells up the corridor, the other werewolf called out in his cockney accent to his moon-cursed friend “Oi, Lysander, she gone?”

“I don’t know,” replied Lysander, “If she can see through that powder by the way, I will kill that little git Mundungus Fletcher, cost us a dozen galleons.”

Then Aurora heard him step into a cabin, perhaps to where his friend was hiding. Pulling her hair from her eyes, and cracking her knuckles so they made satisfying pop of air, Aurora peeked her head out the corridor.

She glanced down the aisle, it was empty.

Playing the waiting game, she moved right back into her cabin, and sat as still as she could. Noting the abandoned luggage, including what looked like a vintage gramophone, she listened for any sounds of movement over the noise the howls of the wind and the thudding of relentless rain entering the carriage. Even though Aurrora tried to stay composed, and focused on the matter at hand, her mind kept casting back to the letters.

Is this what they meant? With the talk of muggle killings on the rise, attacks on muggle-borns and the strange disappearances of ministry workers, something was amiss.

Now, at least ten minutes after a gang of werewolves launched an attack on a muggle train, with dozens of instances of recorded uses of magic in the middle of muggle countryside, where were the Ministry? Had they not attempted to investigate? Were they snowed in, busy fighting fires everywhere? Or had they given up? Or even turned a blind eye?

The werewolf earlier hadn’t been too helpful. She needed to learn more; surely the Ministry couldn’t have ignored something like this? A horrible sensation came over.

Was it possible the Ministry had been infiltrated?

These thoughts did nothing to calm her, and she found it impossible to locate them which cabin they had concealed themselves in. The fog not only concealed them but fought against any locating charms.

Thankfully for her, as she rested her head against a bank of seats, they blinked first.

“Hey, Eddie, go and have a look out there now” said a voice, poorly disguising his fear with a macho rumble in his tones. 

“I don’t want to, why don’t do you go?” replied a panicked response of protest.

“Cowardly little tosser” said the first voice, somewhat hypocritically, “go out there or I will call the boss in and we will see what he has to say”

“I hate you” snarled the cockney voice man. 

Leaping out of his hiding place he shot a series of spells across the hall. Seizing her chance, Aurora crawled low. As a purple jet of light rebounded off the wall, and buried itself in an overhead locker, she turned to the hex-friendly werewolf, and shouted “Stupefy!”. 

A perfect beam of red shot straight from her wand, penetrating the dense blanket of darkness, hitting him square in the chest.

With a grunt he fell to the floor, knocked out cold. 

Bellowing in rage, his companion drew out a knife and ran at Aurora, the silver buttons of his coat reflecting off the deep pools of rain that had developed by the far door.

Though he tried his best to be threatening, he looked in no way like a wolf, other than the trademark deep brow which partially concealed his gaunt eyes. 

Aurora swivelled, and with a flash of her coat, swept away from him, allowing him to stab at the air.

As he turned back to her, Aurora kicked him hard in the knee, before, hair billowing from the power of her curse, thought the word “Depulso” as clearly in her mind as water from a mountain lake.

The wannabe monster took off from the ground, and smashed through the wooden border of a cabin, hitting the ceiling of the train. A loud snap came from his lower back and he let out a long, unerring shriek before crumpling on the floor face down. 

Slightly giddy at the thrill, and more than slightly guilty at feeling that way, she turned back to stupefied man down the corridor.

She made a clenching motion with her hand.

Ropes shot out of her from her wrist and tangled themselves around his body, her night vision detailing his limbs as she bound them. Then using the “Accio” charm with her wand, she pulled him towards her and stuffed him in an undamaged cabin. 

Aware that she had perhaps paralysed the other raider; she left him untied with his grisly colleague. Uninterested in healing him or relieving his pain she simply checked his pulse before spitting on the ground by his feet.

After then rolling the two immobilised, stunned bodies against the wall, Aurora pulled open the cabin window and, wincing at the exposure to the virulent rainfall blowing in from the vengeful skies beyond, dropped both of their wands into the tempestuous abyss outside. 

Then, with the use of her night vision, she took a moment to study the werewolves.

The now crippled man had long shaggy hair, and had clearly seen better days.

He had perhaps been handsome at one point with his red locks and thick eyebrows. They were the remaining vestiges of his former good looks, clinging on through his cursed affliction. She studied his arm; it had a wolf’s head tattoo.

Her charmed sight had worked with an unprecedented level of success. The tool she had created for excavating ancient tombs had served her in this situation admirably well.

Aware of the morose circumstances she was returning home to, and understanding her current predicament, she only allowed a brief smile before shaming herself for being at all happy with her work or behaviour. 

It was still her fault her brother was dead. 

The stupefied man was groaning beneath his ropes. 

She noted that he had an identical tattoo to his crimson haired fiend. As he started to groan into consciousness, she stupefied him again.

Leaving them in the mercilessly cold room, she sealed it with a powerful locking charm. and nursed the ache under her shoulder caused in the rough and tumble of the past few minutes.

She then went back and checked the door into Carriage D behind her, ensuring it was strong enough to repel any bouts of heroism from her fellow commuters.

Satisfied, she stepped over the broken refreshment trolley lying across doorway, and past the sign marked “Carriage A” and into the darkness beyond. 

With her wand out in search of this “boss”, she entered the eerily black threshold of the next room. 

After a single step, there was a swooshing sound, and a brilliant burst of light overwhelmed her senses.

Used to either hours of semi-dirge that had accompanied her journey from Dover, or the unforgiving pitch brought on by the raid only minutes before, the vibrancy of the yellow caused her to stagger. Her wand fell to the floor and rolled across the room.

The powerful glow burned through her night vision and left her completely blind, and she staggered to stay upright. Trying to fight off a fevered panic, she called out “Exitus”.

It was the counter charm that made her sight return to normal and thankfully it worked.

Adjusting to the return of her vision, a voice called out from across the end of the room.

“Sorry poppet if that startled you, but I find it harder to read without the light.”

His tone was gruff and his face was hidden behind the spread of a broadsheet and the thick arms of a leather backed Morris chair.

Aurora made a movement to the ground, searching for her wand on the floor. Unable to see it, her struggles were met with a coarse laughter that filled the room.

The voice from the chair lowered his newspaper and fixed his sunken eyes upon Aurora, his own wand pointing directly at her chest. 

“I don’t think so” he said. His tongue ran over his sharp, blood-stained teeth, saliva lingering on his pronounced canines.

He gestured to a willow wand that had trundled beneath his feet. It had rolled there as soon as Fenrir had switched on the lights.

“Accio” he barked, and Aurora’s wand flew from under his boot and into his waiting hand. 

Before Aurora could think of a response, he wordlessly flicked a spell, and, her legs stiffened immediately. Before she could conjure the counter curse, her jaw rammed itself shut and her arms snapped against her sides.

After a moment’s struggling she toppled backwards, as stiff as a board, the sound of her back hitting the floor more humiliating than painful. 

Utterly immobilised, she turned her gaze towards the man at the far end of the room, only just visible at the bottom of her vision. 

“Between you and me, I never learnt how to read. I just thought it would make a good first impression,” he said.

The man allowed himself to smile once more, and whistling merrily, and tunelessly, he stood up from the chair, which welcomed the loss of burdening his formidable bulk with a loud creak. The polish of his boots twinkled painfully in her eye, as he made his way over to her.

“I heard you take out all my men” he purred almost approvingly. “They meant nothing to me. Besides if there’s anything I find more attractive than a fighter….”

Aurora couldn’t see his face now and only felt his presence through the growing strength of his odious, rank breath.

Noticing this, the man lowered the wand to waist height, caressing it in his fingers.

Ensuring it was within Aurora’s eyesight, he crudely yanked his hand up and down on its rim. He grunted suggestively as he did so.

All the while Aurora bellowed streams of hexes and curses in the back of her mind. “Depulso! Stupefy! Anteoculatia!” she screamed, unproductively. 

She knew she had lost her head when she said Anteoculatia, a spell which only has the effect of giving people antlers. It was absurd, Aurora thought. She was a master of charms, exceptional at spells requiring calmness and precision, and she was even abnormally gifted at wandless magic, verbal and non-verbal.

Though, under such pressure and the looming presence of a sexually aggressive werewolf, her abilities crumpled, partly why she had never been a natural dueller, the altercation with the men in the room before being her first actual duel since Second Year at Hogwarts.

She hated how it had given her such a rush too, to fight those inept werewolves only minutes before.

It had made her arrogant and cocky, oblivious to a simple light charm. Worse than rueing her cavalier idiocy, she was unable to get over the man’s voice, and from the fleeting glimpse she had just had of him, she was afraid that she knew who he was.

“I suspect you know all about me” he announced.

His voice was a rasp, unfinished burr, yet it was so distinctive.

It matched the characteristics described so frequently and resiliently in the papers for weeks and months before she had left for the Far East. When he reached her, lying motionless, he knelt by her face, his pestilent breath running through her nostrils.

He didn’t need to say what he then said.

“I am Fenrir Greyback”.


	3. Tooth and Claw

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A struggle to the death begins with the most infamous werewolf of modern times..

Aurora’s heart sank, her suspicions were correct. 

Fenrir, meanwhile, looked down upon his victim.

He put a hand on the lapel of his coat, which was firmly stretched across his vast, muscled torso.

With a wink, he rocked ever so slightly on the spot, as if somewhat gleeful at giving the revelation of his name.

After taking a glance out at the storm raging beyond the window, he stowed both of their wands in his chest pocket, their handles protruding from a forest of lycanthropic fur.

“Oh now I know you know,” he purred. “You see, the truth is most don’t talk with their lips. They talk with their eyes. I can see it now with you. Look at you. I say that name and your gaze betrays the very fear, I mean if you listen…”

He placed a finger on her chest, the nail digging into her sternum. Aurora’s heartbeat was steadily rising, her pupils dilating with fear. With a delayed growl, deep and coital in nature, he then leaned in and planted his ear where his finger had been moments before. He sat in this pose, Aurora utterly helpless, for a good long while before he craned his neck away and went towards the other end of the carriage.

“People,” he said, floorboards creaking as he circled the room, “say all they need to without words. We are all sacks of meat at the end of the day, every one of us, and none of us are anything special in this dank cesspit. No, animals don’t talk like we do, but we don’t need to talk to say our most primal emotions. The look each woman gives me as their life drains away. I see it every time you know. When I finish a kill. That look in their face. The widening of their eyes, the way they search the ground or the heavens above for something to save them.”

His voice broke off in a chuckle that became another growl. He went to the counter, and Aurora heard the sound of bottles opening and the pouring of liquid into a clinking glass. With a gurgle, he necked it down, before twisting the bottle around in the rough skin of his hands. 

“Those Muggles don’t do it bad you know. But…..Ah, its not the same as the stuff near the school,” Fenrir mused, taking another bottle as he spoke. “I love Hogwarts, all those children, all those people, all those fat necks to bite, all those soft tender hearts to tear into.”

Aware that he was perhaps, taking an unaccustomed amount of time, he went back into the middle of the room and said “Well, first thing you are wondering perhaps, is, if this is first class, with these nice chairs, then we must be near the drivers at the front. Why, in all the commotion did they not stop the train? Well, we found a way to convince them….Imperius Curse. Or at least on one of them. The other….was less…obliging.” 

At that point he took hold of a hefty weight and threw it across the room. It landed a few feet to the left of Aurora’s face with a heavy thud.

A lifeless arm fell across Aurora’s abdomen, and she let out a silent scream when she saw it belonged to an unresponsive human body, its face turned towards her with a listless gaze boring into her eyes. Its neck was bloody and gouged. The pristine white of his locomotive uniform was obscured by splatters of gore. Insides rattling with terror, she fought as hard as she could against her bonds, her nervous system screaming at her unresponsive muscles to move. She yelled curse after curse in her mind, to no avail. Fenrir let out another laugh, acknowledging the hyperventilating pattern of Aurora’s breath, and the heaving of her lungs. 

“Well, what can I say other than that I have a taste for the theatrical? It is two weeks before full moon, and as you saw from those three others of my kind, most werewolves can’t master the savagery of our selves without the aid of Mother Moon. I have no such shortcomings.” 

Tears came from Aurora’s eyes as he went back towards her, this time with a full brandy in his left hand. Finishing it with a slurp, he knelt by her side again and pulled the arm of the corpse off of her midriff. Then he ran his right hand through Aurora’s hair. She shivered at his touch this time, trembling as he placed strands under his nose and deeply inhaled its scent. After a pause, he dammed the flow of tears from her face with his fingertips, leaving scratches on her cheeks from his nails. Then, comparing the smells of her tears and her hair he muttered, “Lavender, the closest flower is lavender”. 

A second later he yanked a lock of her hair out from the front of her forehead. The pain was excruciating. She let out a stifled gasp of agony as blood welled by the gap in her brow and poured across her eyes.

As she moaned in pain, he tied the lock into his own, almost purring as if humoured by the whole thing. He made to get up once more, but stopped, seeing a rose petal protrude from the interior of Aurora's coat.

"What's this?", he then asked. 

He teased the flowerhead out gently with his clawed fingers. The back of his hand brushed against Aurora's breast as her protracted it from her chest pocket. Greyback held it in the air above Aurora's head, studying it like a jeweller might observe a fine diamond.

"Ah," he said, "you got that from Pleasant Percy. I take it you dealt with him."

He heaved his shoulders up, sucking in his breath, impersonating a posh English gentlemen.

"As they may say, he is a 'Good Old Chap' that one. Only problem is, he really likes little kids. I mean, all werewolves love children, but he really, really loves the children if you get my drift".

Admiring the effect of his words, he pulled his tongue between his teeth and said, "Let me explain, while I have you here. You probably wondered why he carries a rose? Just for affect maybe? Well, we gave him the rose because children, are like innocent and soft flowers of the garden. They are delicate little things. They need sunshine, water and appropriate nurturing."

His voice descending to a whisper, he placed his lips to Aurora's ear, and revealed, "Not everyone likes kids. Not everyone likes flowers."

Pulling away from her ear, Greyback rose to his feet.

"When it comes to kids, what he likes to do is hold them down, bite their neck, and pull off their limbs, one," he said pulling a petal off the rose head, "by one", yanking off a second.

"Until there are none left," he finished, ripping every petal off the rose, until all that remained was the characterless bud.

“You have some pretty impressive magic in you. Wandless magic even,” he mused, changing the subject. “Though I can’t be sure, the others of my kind on this blood tour...I repeat myself...they never really were up to the task anyway. Not even dear Percy. They came for the carnage, happy to take on some fat chickens without wands…though… that is the difference between foxes and wolves. A fox looks for the opportunity, the harmless prey preferred, no match for a true witch. A wolf likes a fight however.”

Fenrir then pulled out her wand from his pocket, and laid it still across his fingers. He went into a rigid, bowed, position offering the wand like a servant or squire would offer a sword to a knight, or a prize to a king, mocking the significance of the witch’s tool.

Locking eyes with her he then proposed, “Shall we see how good this wandless magic really is?”

He took both the wands ends and snapped it in two, then four, then eight, before stuffing the broken remains that now resembled little more than errant garden wood into the brandy glass. A sharp intake of breath came from Aurora as he howled with joy at the destruction of her wand.

Abandoning the broken embers of her wand, he leapt to his feet, and strode back towards the other end of the room, pulling out his wand before ripping off his coat and flinging it over his head. His chest was embellished with scars, tattoos and stains of cracked blood. Whilst stretching his shoulder blades, he said to Aurora:

“The driver will keep driving, we can’t apparate out of here, and no Muggle will get in the way, you saw to that dear one. Now, I won’t want my wand for this: the game of nature. So, shall we?” 

With a wordless flick of his wrist, identical to the one that had immobilised her, the power of movement returned to Aurora’s limbs. Recovering from the consuming terror that had gripped her from the previous few minutes, but also simmering with rage at the destruction of her wand, she wasn’t remotely focused on the fact that she had just entered a bare knuckled fight to do the death with the nation’s most infamous werewolf. 

Fenrir threw his wand onto to the pile with his coat, and waited with baited breath for Aurora to stand.

Unaware of how much time she would have, she took her surroundings in. 

She moved away from the corpse of the other driver, and wiped the blood off her face, stemming the crimson tide with a wordless healing charm and ceasing the throbbing pain it was giving her. She scanned the room. The layout was different to the other carriages. Rather than being a corridor with a series of cabins, it was a cross between more relaxed seating and a bar.

The sterile décor remained though to one side stretched a long, sprawling counter, sleek and well-polished in its finish, with an array of untouched fruits and crisp packets in carefully arranged bowls.

A dozen or so chairs would have been dotted across the cabin but Fenrir had stacked them all against a wall, except for one which he had been sitting in, which was positioned near the open door at the far end of the room.

Through the gap Aurora could just see the back of a train driver’s head.

Oblivious to everything that was going on; he was gently humming away whilst he pushed the train, off-grid, through the bowels of a virulent storm outside.

Aurora suspected the train normally would have stopped in weather such as this, under normal circumstances. Greyback’s men probably had the driver imperiused for a few hours before deciding that the Muggles were far enough from notable civilisation for them to attack.

She was worried about Theo, whom if not still unconscious, probably remained stranded with panicked and hysteric muggles in the carriages behind, muggles whom were unable to reach the front of the train and unable to depart a vehicle still speeding along at 65mph. The phones had also been, she could tell by the wires hanging from the ceiling, severed and disconnected from the emergency operating systems at the back of the train. The emergency alarm meanwhile, was covered in a sheet of ice, disconnected bya freezing charm. There was no chance of them calling their policemen. 

“So,” said Greyback, cracking his knuckles until they made a satisfying pop, “what is your name, sunflower?”

“Aurora Meadows,” she replied, walking towards the counter of the bar.

Attempting to regain some courage, she said “Accio,” reaching out for a bottle of vodka. This time, the magic worked, it reached the clasp of her hand, though at a considerably slower pace than the charm would at full-strength with a wand. Fenrir, laughed somewhat amused as she downed a few gulps.

Discarding the bottle, she then turned back towards the bar and said “Accio” again. She caught a small, malt brown liquor bottle in one hand and uncapped it. This time it came faster. Gurgling a few mouthfuls, she let out an exaggerated gasp of satisfaction in an effort to feign confidence, before tossing it down to the side with the vodka, hearing it clink against the other bottle. 

“Ah. Sister of Rupert Meadows, perhaps?” Fenrir said, smiling at the revelation.

“Perhaps,” she said, curtly.

“Well, in a way, I guess it is noble of you die so soon after him,” Fenrir teased.

There was no way for her to get out of this, aside from maybe a footrace with a werewolf back to the trapped muggles. A race that she was certain to lose, and if she did not, then there was little to be gained by endangering them as well as her. No, she would have to defeat Fenrir Greyback to ensure the safety of herself and everyone on the train. He was a brutal, cold-blooded, warm-blooded killer, whom would target many others after her. 

What she needed to do was get some time, she had lost her head on the floor minutes ago, when she thought she would be killed, and perhaps raped, by a savage man-beast whilst immobile on the floor.

If she would kill a werewolf, even untransformed, without a wand, she needed to regain her composure and use her brain.

Her first technique was distraction. “Are you fighting for You-Know-Who then? He doesn’t want half-breeds, he’ll dispose of you as soon as you aren’t needed.”

“Brave now, aren’t you,” Fenrir chuckled, “perhaps, but I am not doing this for him. This is for me. Just because the Ministry are turning a blind eye to it doesn’t mean I am on his side.”

“So that’s why they aren’t here. At least fifty muggles on a train going into a dangerous storm with werewolves, hexes and dead drivers, in the space of what, an hour? And still they aren’t here. Who is he leaning on Fenrir?” she said, utterly appalled. 

“How would I know?” said Fenrir, shrugging.

“Has he infiltrated the ministry?” Aurora demanded. 

“Maybe. Maybe not, petal. Whatever the case, they have an awful lot on their plate with my kind and dark wizards running up and down the country. I reckon we can forgive a little incompetency on their part. I doubt many of them really care about Muggles anyway.” 

“You’re lying.”

“Suit yourself. But you asked me just now: why aren’t they here? They have been looking for me for years, and here I am. Just me, and there are no takers. And then there is you: beautiful, bleeding and very much in mortal danger. I don’t see the Aurors coming.”

“Some of them have died fighting your lot.”

“And it looks like you will too.”

“It won't change your fate. Voldemort won’t show you mercy, you parasitic bastard. He won’t need you forever. You’re a dead man walking.”

“He doesn’t scare me.”

“Liar.”

“When I am done, he will fear me. When my kind rises against yours, and have all the blood we could ever possibly need, it won’t just be your little family that gets ripped apart.”

He then turned towards her standing there in her coat and blood-stained attire. After a moment of waiting he said, “So, are we done with the posturing?”

“Are you willing,” she replied suggestively, tossing her hair back provocatively, biting her lip as if teasing an inept sexual partner. 

“Say hello to your brother for me!” he said. 

Quick as a flash, he then transformed his face into the bloodthirsty guise of a relentless carnivore. He let out a powerful growl, and a rumble emanated from below his neck. Hands bared, claws raised, he went onto all fours and lunged.

Aurora was ready for him, and her plan had worked. 

What Fenrir had actually said about the Ministry could plague her thoughts later, but the conversation itself had served at building up her adrenalin.

It gave her the sufficient determination to fight off the beast known infamously as Greyback. 

If she survived, a bigger, much more vital fight was ahead of her, one for the preservation of her entire world. 

As his limbs became a hairy blur, she weaved out the way and shouted “Flipendo” at the shelves of alcohol by the bar, pulling a colourful array of liquors and spirits and across the room. He ducked low and tried to skid across the ground, missing the bulk of the flying glass but taking an empty whisky bottle in the jaw and a rum canter in the ankle. With an enraged howl, he threw a clawed punch at Aurora, missing her by millimetres, instead cutting through her hair with his nails. 

Aurora leapt over the counter, and ducked once more as Greyback aimed several punches in her direction, meeting only the air this time. She stayed low, in an effort to find some sort of kitchen knife to aid her defence behind the counter, before eventually stumbling across a bottle opener. 

Greyback leapt onto the side after her, making huge indents in the plastic surface as he gained his balance. Aurora threw the bottle opener, using a hovering charm to guide it, deep into his chest. The werewolf, cried out in pain, and tipped backwards onto the floor.

After writhing there momentarily, he yanked out the metal corkscrew, taking lumps of tissue with it, fortunate that it missed his heart as he had swayed to gain balance on the counter. He then batted away the containers of fruit and confectionary that Aurora chucked into his path. His recovery had startled Aurora, whose face was now dripping in sweat, her stamina already waning. 

Unsure of how next to continue, with Greyback back on his feet, Aurora considered awakening the driver from his cursed stupor but realised her wandless magic would not give her the means. It would not be wise either, as in reality it would only give Greyback a slight distraction before he killed that muggle too.

Instead, her mind went to the electricity in the room, something anathema to magic. It was energy after all, could it still be possible to manipulate?

Trying a banishing charm, she climbed onto the counter and said “Depulso”, pointing her finger at the ceiling, aiming at the light in the centre of the room. 

Nothing happened.

Convinced it was the right spell she said “Depulso! Depulso! Depulso!” again and again. The light flickered intermittently, though the desired effect was not reached. Greyback laughed at her futile efforts, and Aurora, forgetting that by standing on the counter she had left herself exposed, felt Greyback pick her up by the legs.

She kicked and struggled, but he squeezed her limbs firm and slammed her hard against the floor. He went for a quick decisive punch, but Aurora rolled out of the way just in time, fortunate to only be winded by the drop rather than dazed. Greyback bellowed outin frustration, giving her just enough time to point at the light again and call “Depulso!”

For the second time, nothing happened.

Then, with a pleasurable snarl, Greyback grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her across the room.

She fought against his grip, shaking her body and burying her fingers in the crevices of the floor, but he was far too strong. He dragged her the through shards of glass on the floor, that tore into her legs. She cried out in agony, wounded and exhausted, before he crushed her under his immense bulk. 

Otherwise overpowered, she yanked her right hand free, as from the corner of her eye; she saw a shattered bottle of tonic water. All she could hear was the heavy breath of Greyback, growling feverishly as her arm searched for the weapon futilely across the floor, in a vain effort to reach it and bury it in his eye.

Though to her fevered panic, she only clutched at thin air, her hand brushing only against the rough of the carpet. 

“Accio! Accio! Accio!” she thought and thought again with increasing, hysterical panic, squirming under the weight of the beast that wrestled with her movements. Then, Greyback grabbed her right and pulled it back towards her body, pinning her completely flat against the ground, leaving her body immobilised under his torso. 

“No!” she yelled. “No! No!” 

She tried to bite his hand, though the skin was too tough and sinewy in complexion to make an indent. For her efforts he then punched her in the temple and the world around her began to spin. The pain did not register, she did not notice that her own blood streaked down to her neck, collect in her eyebrows.

Instead, all she felt was a whirling sensation and confusion over her own surroundings. She didn’t even struggle anymore, her vulnerability not registering in the mental confusion. She only felt bursts of pain as Greyback held her right hand aloft and broke several of her fingers.

Aurora was completely unable to determine where the pain was coming from, and was actually filled with the sense she was falling from the sky, with the room dancing around her.

Then Greyback, putting her limp hand to one side, clasped her throat with both of his, grinning as the oxygen left her body, whilst his claws buried themselves deep in her skin. Her mouth was open in an airless, noiseless scream of tremendous pain. As she felt her life force ebb away, she then felt Greyback’s hands release her neck. Her air would return intermittently, only for Greyback to throttle her once again. Was he torturing her? Letting the life force go backwards and forwards until she eventually passed out.

Out of an instinct of protection or perhaps futility, a clear thought waded through the scrambled notes of her consciousness, “It’s Reducto not Depulso”. 

Meanwhile, as Greyback strangled her once more, he let his guard down. He enjoyed this part of the kill too much. His focus was lingering too pleasurably on the narrowing of her pupils as she verged in and out of life, his thoughts perhaps being that of arousal. Now he was baring his teeth, perhaps inching forward to begin chewing on her neck.

As the horrors continued, he was unaware that the single thought, "Reducto", emanated through her skull, and the urge to say it became overpowering.

She snuck her left, unbroken, hand out of Greyback’s mass, and when he loosened his grip to tease her with air once more, she pointed at the light and screamed with the waning power of her throat, “Reducto!”

The light fell from the ceiling and crashed into Greyback, scalding him with hot fire, the electrical current coursing across his shoulders and corroding his skin. He fell backwards, collapsing on the floor beside her. He lay still, unerringly still, firmly in the netherworld between loss of consciousness and death’s door. 

Immediately her breath returned to her and she sat bolt upright, retching and spluttering for air like a freshly caught trout taken from the sea. Her vision remained a blurred mist and her thoughts a cloud beneath the leaden weight of her pounded headed.

Soon though, she became increasingly aware of the searing pain she was in, so much so that she crumpled into a foetal position. The blood from her wounds forming several small pools either side of her. 

After a few moments, she blacked out.


	4. An Unusual Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the bloodshed, the squabbling Ministry arrive at the scene. A rabble broken up by one shining white knight.

As Aurora lay there unconscious, the train ground to a halt with a crash.

Ministry wizards burst into the carriage, with Theo, nursing the cut to his face, straggling in behind.It had been forty minutes since he and a handful of muggles had been attacked by the werewolves; though out of the rain the cavalry had now finally appeared.

Judging by the sight of Greyback, burned and emitting sparks on the floor, they had really come a bit late for the Lord Mayor’s show.

They made up a congregation of about a dozen, wearing different uniforms and attire.  
They stood still whilst a few of them, in yellow robes, acting as a coordinated crew, swept across the carriage.

Within seconds it was in a better state than when it was first built. Its sterile surfaces were not only clean but glistening, whilst the glass of the windows was crystal clear. The floors were now immaculate, and only the injured bodies of Fenrir Greyback and Aurora Meadows offering any evidence of the blood and warfare that had gone on moments before their arrival.

Unfazed by the dead muggle driver lying by the door, they ushered in two other ministry wizards in dark suits. They lifted the body onto a stretcher and filed out, corpse in tow, immediately afterwards. Then, only once the Aurors and Magical Law enforcers were left in the room, alongside an irate Theo, did they focus their attention back on Greyback and Aurora. The stirring of their broken breath was hidden beneath the unabatingly powerful rain and sleet rocking the cabin walls.

Theo gasped as he glimpsed her face, which was bruised and bloodied.

Letting out at a theatrical cry of panic, he ran to her aid, reassuring himself over the beat of her pulse.

“Look at her!” he said. “She’s lucky to be alive, left alone with that creature! Where have you been this whole time?”

“Peace Doctor. You know the times we are in. We were fighting the dementors earlier this hour, Giants rampant in Wales only a little before that," said the flustered voice of a portly little wizard, whom looked at Aurora with an element of disdain, perhaps more squeamish of the blood than the others.

“You didn’t do much of the fighting, and you spent the last few minutes clearing the minds of hysterical muggles. I sent an owl for your aid a good time ago too! A muggle owl! I mean, trying to convince one of that lot that their pet could send post was a right ball-ache! Does the statute of secrecy mean more than a woman’s life? Pretending to the world everything’s dandy, and that you’re winning a war, whilst you knew she was locked in a metal tin with Greyback?”

Theo's protestsations had become so animated that his flappy arms were raised in discontented fury.

“You know he has a point,” said deep boom from the threshold, “catching Greyback is a pretty big score”. 

“Mr. Fudge,” said an almost identical canon of a voice, though this one carrying a slight Atlantic twang, “this could even make the papers tomorrow if you’re quick”.

“Yes….good points….Shacklebolt and err….Shacklebolt,” muttered Fudge.

Turning to his fellow Magical Law enforcers; he said, “Now take a statement from the selected muggles, the ones in Carriage D. Then alert the muggle authorities that a signalling error….erm…yes that should do it has caused a train of theirs to go off piste as it were. I am sure some of their emergency services will make it through, even in this turbulent weather. Lynch, Evescott, both stay here on guard when everyone has left. Pose as rail stewards, console the muggles, and make sure they all make it back safely. We really are in the middle of nowhere here, about thirty miles from any town. I don’t want to have to wipe their memories again. Frankly, explaining portkeys to a bunch of unimaginatives is a real bore.” 

Theo assumed his use of unimaginatives was ironic as Fudge to his mind, seemed like a complete stiff.

Carrying on Fudge said, “Has the anti-Dissaparating jinx been lifted?”

“Yes, sir,” said one of his underlings.

“Good. Then I must now head to London and alert the Prophet of Greyback’s capture. Some good news at last!"

After a pause, he even murmured to himself, "With the world going to hell in a handcart, it’s at least good to go with a merry song and dance”, before turning on the spot and disappearing out of sight.

“Thank God that old fruitcake is gone” said a cheery lady, making no effort to hide her low opinion of Fudge.

She basked in the titters her comments generated.

“You know we were lucky we stopped the train when we did. We are so far off course! We'd have driven into a field so flooded that it would have become a lake by tomorrow morning. Is the woman on the floor going to be okay, Kingsley?”

“I hope so Alice, I hope so. Can’t believe we didn’t make it here until now. Fudge may think it was okay, but that wolf could have killed her.” said Kingsley.

“It didn’t help that she locked the door with a charm that took seven of us to blast through!” replied the Atlantic double.

“It doesn’t excuse us, Amadeus. Now, go with Alastor. Ah, he’s here now and take Greyback with you, I designated some healers to look over him.”

“Healers? Pah! I dare say firebrand Crouch will want to throw the book at him,” growled Mad-Eye, stumbling into the room, wooden leg beating the ground.

“You know him, can’t get his ideas past the court yet,” replied Kingsley.

“Only a matter of time Kingsley, only a matter of time. Come on Amadeus, we’ll take him now,” said Mad-Eye, gesturing to Kingsley’s brother and conjuring a stretcher and lifting Greyback on to it roughly. Pointing at four of the enforcement agents in the corner of the room he said, “I will take you lot as guard, alright? You can help me and Amadeus protect the healers given the sod’s job of fixing up an evil monster like this”.

“I heard You-Know-Who turned up. Is that true?”

“Only briefly, but he left enough dementors behind to give us a lot of trouble.”

Then swivelling his magical eye, he said, “And someone take that girl to St Mungo’s now, that fractured skull could be permanent brain damage without some pretty quick care. Though I’d be more worried by the choke wounds on her neck myself”.

“That eye of his,” mused Kingsley, before computing the import of his words and turning in alarm to Aurora.

She still lay flat on her back with Theo by her side, seeing a rather dazzling array of stars, he said, “Are there no healers for her here?”

Moody growled, “I tried, but I was given strict order by Fabian that they were for Greyback. Seriously, we waste all our best on scumbags like this! Don’t think the healers are for her I am afraid.”

“What!” said Theo turning away from the injured Aurora on the floor, swivelling around in furious rage, “Those slippery eels! Look at her for Merlin’s sake!”

Kingsley, cut across, replied, “Any suggestions, Alastor on what to do?”

“I said St Mungo’s just now, but I wouldn’trisk the travel of getting her there with a Portkey unless she gets a good potion first,” he grumbled. “Longbottom, give the train another run through and go with Kingsley afterwards, we have a lead on Dolohov’s little scheme in Knockturn Alley. First You-Know-Who himself ventures foot with an army of dementors in Hogsmeade, and now this. Blimey Charlie! We have had one manic night on our hands!"

Mad-Eye and Amadeus left the carriage, their select band of guards following up in the rear.

Before Kingsley could reach a decision on what to do with Aurora, a letter flew into his hands. A small tawny owl had flown through the carriage, deposited a note, and had then flown straight back to where it had come from in a matter of seconds, barely pausing for breath. It had braved the storms in a fashion more resilient than any man. 

Tearing it open he said to Alice, “It’s from Dumbledore, he says he will be here on the train at eleven p.m, with Madam Pomfrey. He needs a word with a Miss Aurora Meadows. I take it that is the woman on the floor by Dr Morgan. It looks like Madam Pomfrey can fix her up.”

“As in the daughter of Wizengamot judge, Gideon Meadows?” asked Alice, a little surprised.

Kingsley stroked his chin in contemplation.

“Hope his recently *unpopular* opinions at the ministry haven’t caused these delays".

“That’s the one” said Theo “and I don’t think he’d be happy one bit when he finds out how far down the pile medical aid has been for his daughter!”

“I thought she was off in the Far East, Flitwick’s favourite, a renowned curse-breaker?” asked Kingsley.

“She came home for the funeral I imagine. I hope her family doesn’t suffer any more grief. Kingsley what time is it?” asked Alice.

“10.59pm,” he replied.

“Well, I better head off then before Dumbledore comes. Apparently, he is still in a grump with me over the fiasco down at the New Forest. I will meet you outside the train in a quarter of an hour."

With that, Alice went back up the train.

“Damn ministry bastards, more concerned with getting the creature fit for trial than anything else. But if it’s 10.59 …” Theo grumbled looking at his own watch, “he should be here….about….”

“About now?” queried a calm, musical voice.

“Dumbledore,” said Theo breathlessly. 

“Dr Morgan,” said Dumbledore, his hand raised in greeting “thank you for staying by Miss Meadows in all the commotion. Please could you now stand aside for Madam Pomfrey? I think a few of the Magical Enforcers are leaving for the West Country now if that’s where you’re headed”

“You will look after her?” queried Theo.

"I promise”, his eyes twinkling above his silver robes.

“Very well,” said Theo, checking Aurora’s pulse one more time, and giving her hand a squeeze, before rushing out the room. Kingsley also departed, leaving Aurora alone with Madam Pomfrey and Dumbledore. 

“She is in a bad way, Albus,” said Madam Pomfrey. The school matron was studying Aurora, whom lay on the floor. She had awakened slightly from her concussed state, but it was little more than an unfocused stream of consciousness.

“I know, but with your skill, I have the utmost faith,” said Albus, studying the lines around her throat.

“We can give her this potion, it will stabilise her mind for travel. She was nearly throttled to insanity by that hideous beast, poor girl,” said Madam Pomfrey, voice trembling.

“Will the scars come off?”

“Hopefully so, it wasn’t full moon, the cuts on her neck are deep but they aren’t completely cursed. Though I can't be sure, it was still a werewolf. The fracturing on her skull needs to be healed. But it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

And with a flourish of her wand, Madam Pomfrey expertly healed the wounds on her brow. 

Then she poured a deep purple potion into Aurora’s mouth. Instantaneous was its effect, she stopped stirring, and lay peacefully still. The warmth of her breath was the only clue to her gentle heartbeat.

“That’s all I can do here, those wounds will need to be bandaged. I need more time for the scars on her neck. I can take her to the Hogwarts Infirmary for a night or two and you can talk to her then, but then she really needs rest at St Mungo’s. Especially if she was heading back for the funeral next week.”

“No, it can't be St Mungo's." 

"Why not?"

"Trust me on this."

"Very well." 

"I will travel to Nelson Hall and let her family know. At least the news wouldn’t have been as grave as I feared”

“They have had enough bad news already.”

“I know. Take this by the way".

With a sigh, Dumbledore pointed his wand at a measuring jug resting on the surface of the refurbished bar. Catching it with one hand as it flew across the room, he gave it a quick tap with his wand.

With a glow of blue light, it took on a ghostly shimmer.

"Use this portkey to get back to Hogwarts, Pomona".

“What is it you need with her Albus?”

“She has some skills I require very urgent use of. I wouldn’t normally be so forward in a request, not after such an occurrence, but I am afraid it is vital.”

Madam Pomfrey bowed her head, and with a hand on Aurora, she touched the handle. They both disappeared in a flash, leaving behind only a momentary flash of the jug.

Dumbledore then turned to leave, before a startled voice behind him called out, the tone filled with confusion. 

“Hey, what the bloody hell is going on here? You can’t be in first class!” said the train driver, emerging from the Imperius Curse and stepping out of his seat and into the spotless, empty lounge of the carriage.

He examined the six-foot tall, silver-bearded man with an opened, gaping mouth, unsure he’d ever seen anyone like him before in his entire life.

“Quite right,” Dumbledore chuckled, “I’d better be off then”.


	5. Nocturnal Illusions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora awakens from a plethora of confused dreams to find herself at Hogwarts, in the hospital wing. Back at a place she hadn't visited since school days,she meets Dumbledore to try and uncover the truth of her brother's death.

She was falling - descending through a cloudless sky.

Vivid hues of yellow and blue overwhelmed her senses, and beams of light danced in front of her eyes.

A drum beat, of relenting force, of merciless sound, reverberated off the edges of the world.

She continued to drop and her body was sucked into a vacuum, a dark abyss below the colours above. 

The borealis became a distant memory as she crashed to the ground. Her hands shivered at its granite touch. As she made to stand in the consuming void, a fire of brilliant red erupted by her feet.

Then from the fire emerged, in a way beyond her comprehension, yellow roses. They were flowers of suffocating roots that tangled themselves across the void. They filled her vision, before they crumbled; crushed under the weight of a charioteer riding past her, blowing air into the blackened hole she was isolated in. 

Then the vision crumbled, and she remembered it no more.

After a while, more conventional, happier dreams hit her.

Soon however they also subsided, ebbing away from her memory. She then felt herself drift into consciousness like flotsam from a storm-ridden shipwreck, making its way to a distant bay. 

A male voice broke through the remnants of her inertia. “Abou’ time you woke up, eh?”

He sounded cheery and distinctive in tone; his accent markedly familiar to her. Particularly in the way it bit the syllables off every few words. 

With a groan she stirred into conciousness, her eyes still fluttering under the weight of fatigue. Finding herself in a narrow hospital bed wearing soft cotton night clothes, she sat up and turned to a creaking chair on her left. In it sat a smiling man. He had one hand on his black beard, which was rubbing his scruffy drooping curls, and the other, bizarrely, on a pastel coloured umbrella resting against his knee.

“Hagrid?” she said, her eyes lighting up in surprise at his sudden re-appearance into her life. 

“’Ello Rory," he chuckled, "long time no see”. 

Beaming with unnerving positivity, Aurora pulled pack her bedsheets and grabbed Hagrid as firmly as she could, embracing him in a tight hug. Despite his great size, Hagrid wobbled in his seat from this expressive display of enthusiasm.

“Easy mind, yer still a bit tender after all”, he said, still laughing away. 

Letting him go, she replied “I’ve missed you.”

Involuntarily she began to smile. The creases it caused to her skin felt unusually foreign to her after such an extended period of emotional sobriety. 

“Yer’ve probably missed a lot of people, mind. Yer hav’nt stepped foot over ‘ere since you left ‘Ogwarts."

After a pause she then said, “Is it really you?”

“Hardly going t' be anyone else, now, am I?” answered Hagrid, his face turning a cheery red from the warmth of a nearby fire.

“Well,” said Aurora, “that’s probably true. Not many men have such a formidable beard.”

“Or me charm,” laughed Hagrid breezily, “How’re yer feeling?”

“Ok, I think. How long was I out for?” 

“Only a day.”

“How do I look?”

Aurora was patting her body down, unable to decipher any bandages beneath the nightshirt she had been dressed in. She brushed her fingers across her face, and then stroked her neck, pausing as she felt three small but firm ridges on both sides of her throat.

“Here take a look if yer’d like," said Hagrid cheerfully.

Hagrid offered her an ornate hand-held mirror.

Clutching it in fingers that felt feeble from a day’s rest, she titled the mirror towards her neck. The lines were narrow, but protruded a few millimetres from her skin, and were coloured a more intense pink than the rest of her body. 

The fangs and claws of a werewolf were cursed weapons after all, that left indelible marks on their victims, even beyond the hellish opportunity of a full moon. Their marks remained where the knocks of a fist or wand could not so easily linger on the skin. Aside from her neck, it would be difficult to find any grisly mementos of the night on the train. Her face was unblemished from the fight. The lock of hair that had been torn from the front of her head had been regrown to full length whilst the cuts and knocks inflicted on her abdomen were little more than a mental recollection.

What was more impressive, however, was the full return of her memory.

She remembered everything on the train, from Greyback to the eccentrically dressed muggles. An unnerving development from this is that as she remembered it, it was almost as if her body was releasing a cornucopia of endorphins, or some sort of permanent cheering charm. Her recalling of it was exhilarating to her, and as she pondered Greyback’s demise she felt a grudging sense of pride in her accomplishment. 

“Pomphrey fixed most it up in minutes; the only real problems were the wounds to yer neck’ he said, in his matter-of-fact way.

“Hmm….so, it’s not too bad” asked Aurora, tentatively.

“Yeah yer’ll be all good to leave, I reckon, once she is back" replied Hagrid.

There was a pause as Aurora drank this information in, before she asked, “Were St Mungo’s involved?”

“No, Pomphrey did it all.”

“Bit of a stretch for a school matron.”

Hagrid gave her a wink, “Well, yer know, she’s more than jus’ any old matron.”

That was true, and Aurora knew it. No matter how prickly she had always found Madam Pomphrey’s demeanour, she was a master of her craft - something that she had to be grateful for.

"So, are these wounds technically cursed?" she then inquired.

"Well, originally Pomphrey thought maybe yes - maybe no. Turns out that as Greyback was at a halfway house, mauling but acting outside full moon I mean, so were the cuts. They shrunk a lot, not enough to go away entirely. Let us know if you gain any wolfish features."

"My bite is too tough for a werwolf,"Aurora teased.

"I bet it is, Rory," chuckled Hagrid.

“What about Greyback?”

“Oh ‘im? He’s gone. Thanks to you. He’ll be in Azkaban by now.”

“Already?”

“Well, they're giving 'im a trial. To much anger it mus' be said. ‘Caused a bit of tug and war at the Ministry yesterday. Some wanted rough justice. They decided that actually, they want ter make a bit of a show ou' of it, I bet. Probably be pretty soon .”

“Will I be required as a witness?”

“No, don’t think so. They have enough. Funnily enough before yer burned him all over he had done quite a few crimes already.”

They both looked at each other and laughed. In an expression really of tremendous relief, tears came from Aurora’s eyes, involuntarily sliding down her face at the black comedy of situation. 

“Here, have a look at the paper,” said Hagrid, stifling his cheer with a cough. 

Hagrid leant down and picked up the Daily Prophet, ignoring the tears to one side (Aurora suspected Fang may have been responsible), she saw the front page’s tagline “GREYBACK CAPTURED”.

There for all to see was Greyback, roaring in rage from the photograph, holding a number in front of a cold brick exterior. 

The glowing joy ruminating within her began to dissipate as she remembered his soulless stare, his bestial strength, and how he had grabbed her like a rag doll. She knew that, in reality, she avoided a pretty unpleasant death only by chance. Self-doubt predicated that she dismissed any beliefs that it came from her intelligence. In her mind, was every suggestion that the word “Reducto” may never have come to her at all. It seemed like little more than a fluke than a brainwave. She thought that she had recalled everything with crystal clarity, but it was only as she flicked through the pages devoted to his capture that she remembered he’d snapped her wand.

Her trusted old friend, of eleven inches and willow tree wood, that had been obliterated in his coarse grip. Scanning the article, noting its triumphant tone but vague detail, she turned to Hagrid to question him further. 

“At least there is no mention of me in here,” she said.

“Nope," answered Hagrid, ruffling his beard. "Ministry didn’t need prompting mind, but Dumbledore kept yer name outta it. Prophet wanted a good headline, the Ministry wanted the credit. Story going is that them Aurors tracked him to a train and ambushed him. A load of codswallop I know. But it’s not credit yer’d want, all sorts of buggers would be after yer if they’d known yer’d taken out Greyback.”

Hagrid then bent down once more and picked up a muggle motorbike magazine, this one in much better condition than the paper, as if lovingly caressed by its reader. He opened up a spread of pages and pointed out one of the Harley Davidson’s to Aurora. She was a frequent humouring voice to his various madcap schemes during her school years. 

“Yer know," he continued, "I really want a motorbike. These contraptions, I mean, I know few people, this Weasley chap for one down at the Ministry who has a proper interest in them. He seemed a decent sort.”

“Hagrid," exclaimed Aurora, aghast,"you can’t go round propositioning Ministry officials with business ventures. What if they report it?”

“Nah, not a chance," he said, batting away her rebuke. "More fussed about dark wizards than to bother clamping down on a bit of dabbling, Rory. Yer saw that yourself.”

“From what I know," replied Aurora, her voice stern, "it is when the world goes mad that people obsess over the little things, actually.”

Hagrid shuffled uncomfortably on his chair before, rebutting, “Well, I'll be careful, whatever the case.”

Riffing on the whimsy of their conversation, Aurora indulged in a few musings. “Bikes. I guess it’s an improvement. I suppose, I mean normally you would be adopting, what, chimaeras and giant spiders.”

“Watch it Rory, only yer and Professor Dumbledore, and okay....half the staff, know about Aragog around here.”

“Good point, Hagrid. Where is ‘here’?”

“Here?” said Hagrid, eyebrow raised. “Well, it sounds a bit funny, but yer in a closet. With a fireplace.”

“ I see”, Aurora was highly bemused by all this. She took in the wood panelled décor, the shelves of books and the fireplace, that graced the room with a gentle flickering frame. It was a pretty unusual cupboard by all accounts.

“I mean, it just doesn’t look like the Hospital Wing as I remembered it.”

“Oh no, yer weren’t put with the pupils. This ‘closet’ is next to Madam Pomphrey’s office. Her little rec room. Wanted to keep yer ‘way from prying eyes.”

“Didn’t trust the kids?”

“Well, the kids maybe, but some of 'em have Death Eater daddies back 'ome.”

“Ah...” said Aurora, acknowledging the thread of his observations.

Hagrid then mopped a dense coating of sweat from his brow, before muttering to himself, “It’s no good."

Pointing at the fireplace with his umbrella, he gave out a loud grunt. Suddenly a flume of water, litres in volume, blasted from his wand and vanquished the flame. It was a little overdone, with water soaking the wood and dripping off the back of the wall, though the magic impressed Aurora nonetheless.

“I never knew you could that!” she said, her voice high-pitched in astonishment.

“It’s a little trick of mine.”

She giggled once more, she knew Hagrid had been expelled, but the fact that he had clearly concealed the broken shards of wand in an umbrella seemed utterly preposterous to her.

“I have missed yer, Rory, you know," he said, eyebrows raised in a jolly spread of wings like a seagull coming into bay. "You were always such a livewire. Flitwick still sings your praises most weeks.”

“Hope you do too?” teased Aurora.

“Well, have to admit yer always gave me a good chuckle. The time yer and yer friends rattled old Kettleburn sticks out.”

“He’d given us all detention for sneaking off into the woods the week before.”

“Surprised yer let a man with two limbs catch you so easily.”

“We got back at him, dragon soil is a little more flammable than what he was used to in that vegetable patch of his.”

“He was convinced it was yer. Not even the group of yer lot, he just thought it was Meadows the black sheep.” 

Hagrid wiped further sweat off his brow. The quenching of the flames had done little good to his dampen his sticky demeanour.

“I remember ‘im ranting about it to the staff. Weren’t for me convincing him he’d mis-labelled the bags and he may have taken yer limbs as payment for the lost eyebrows. What would I do without you eh? Half me laughs gone tha's for sure.”

At that point Hagrid turned to Aurora, and hardened his features. Leaning in to where Aurora sat on the bed, he said in a sombre tone. “Look I am really sorry about your brother. I liked him a lot. Charming man, Rupert. He had a real thing for the animals around here too.”

Hagrid had meant it as a commiseration. He didn’t realise it was a catalyst. The change in conversation, the mention of her bother, hit Aurora instantly. She had forgotten. In the euphoria of their conversation, she had failed to even remember why she was home in the first place. Revelling in her defeat of Greyback and in the emergence of an old friend, she had taken leave of her senses. She hated herself for it. She was home not for idle chitter-chatter, she was there to find out what had happened to Rupert.

She began to cry, again, for the second time in a handful of minutes. This time they were of no relief. They formed a pool of tears that obscured her eyes and stung her.

She turned away from Hagrid.

He shuffled uncomfortably in his chair.

He sat, emotionally moved but torn over what to do. He was aware he may have made a conversational misstep, as she gulped for air and sobbed. She pushed back the growing sense of catharsis from their earlier exchanges and permitted her other feelings of hopelessness and confusion to swell within her soul. Aurora didn’t know where to begin, where to look, and how to find out about Rupert. 

After another delay, Hagrid passed her a tissue. Thanking him for it, she dabbed her eyes before turning to Hagrid with a fixed sense of determination.

“What happened to my brother, Hagrid?”

“I don’t know”

“Hagrid…”

“I mean it Rory, I don’t have a clue. None of us do. Tell yer what it was a right shock. They found his body somewhere. Then Mad-Eye mentioned to me that the funeral is in a few days.”

“That is all you know?”

“Yer, I promise.”

“Did my parents turn up when I was asleep?”

“Your family thought about coming, but Dumbledore assured them yer'd be fine. So they’re waiting for you at home. I reckon they’re pretty anxious to see yer.”

“Dumbledore?”

“Yeah”

She took in this revelation with a deep sense of scorn. 

With a scowl, she remarked, “First time my mother and father reunited over anything I suspect since my mother started her new relationship with nightly bottles of port.”

“Don’t be harsh on them Rory.”

“But I don’t understand. Most parents come running when their precious little darlings scrape a knee, I was nearly throttled to death by a werewolf in case you didn’t know!”

“I know, I know Rory, but look….”

“And what’s this about assuring? Was it Dumbledore’s orders?”

“Listen I…”

“Is that why you’re here too? Dumbledore’s orders? Have you been keeping guard of me?”

“It’s not how you think.”.

“Explain then?”

“Well, I’ve only been here for a bit.”

“So you’ve taken shifts?”

“We all have?”

“Who’s we?”

“Well…. a few of us…”

“Dumbledore’s idea again?”

“I mean, Rory, it was more like….”

Now however, Aurora was incandescent with rage. White-hot anger fuelled the bitterness, and resentment that had hung over conscience like a shadow, toxifying with her feelings of hopelessness and futility. The fury coursed through her veins. 

She had come all this way and remained none the wiser to the world crumbling apart in front of her face. Even her parents hadn't bothered to show. Estranged as they were, remaining partners only in name, she thought they would have come.

She was worried, scared beyond comprehension as other thoughts began to creep into her consciousness. Maybe they were dead? Maybe Hagrid was hiding something? Overwhelmed by a sense of panic, she turned her accusations towards him. 

“Is that how Rupert died too? Dumbledore’s orders?”

“Rory, what on earth are you talking about? This is mad.”

She spat on the floor, fobbing off his protestations, and seethed her teeth in vicious anger. “Why am I here? At Hogwarts? Part of some cover up? And who does Dumbledore think he is to order me around?”

She stood up from the bed, her head level with Hagrid’s, whom incidentally remained sat in his chair, perhaps paralysed in shock at Aurora’s abrupt change in mood. He tried to mutter a response, but Aurora didn’t let him finish a single syllable. 

“You expect me to walk out of here without the answers I need. You seem pretty up to date Hagrid, with your knowledge on Greyback, your contact with Dumbledore. But when I ask why my parents aren’t here, or what really happened to Rupert I get nothing off of you?”

“Dumbledore…”

“Dumbledore, Dumbledore, Dumbledore….You know I don’t care. I don’t get why you’ve all been watching me. I don’t get why I am at Hogwarts of all places. What’s happened Hagrid? What I saw on the train, it showed me the chaos that is developing all around us and I want answers. What is this secrecy about?”

“Listen, Rory, I…”

“Don’t stutter, speak up! What the hell is going on?”

Without even realising, Aurora was now holding Hagrid by the lapels of his coat, her tantrum both deep and petulant in nature, consuming her features. Her eyes bore into Hagrid’s. He continued to do little more than stare back at her, as if hoping this sudden change of emotions was little more than a storming tempest that would eventually dissipate into soothing waves. His expression was one of almost pity, as she continued to shout and yell. 

Then, a voice came from the threshold of the closet.

“Aurora Jane Meadows, calm yourself this instant!”

The door had swung open during Aurora’s fierce complaints and revealed Madam Pomphrey, who was armed with a pile of clothes and a look of authoritative disdain. She approached Aurora, cutting through the momentum of her rage, and prodded her firmly in the chest.

“This,” she said, gesturing to Hagrid with an irate scowl, her sharp nailed finger still buried in Aurora’s sternum, “you petulant child, is a Hogwarts staff member. Now you may no longer be a pupil, but you are here in my ward, under our time, and you will show him some respect.”

Aurora looked away, furious at Hagrid’s inability to communicate but also increasingly embarrassed at her lack of restraint. She realised she had pushed it too far.

“Now, the world may feel a little confusing to you right now, but is it not possible that all of us feel the same way? Did you not think of that before starting your little tantrum? It isn’t just you who feels as if this isn’t making any sense.”

She gave Aurora a look of utter condescension before continuing, “Is it not possible, also, that maybe, just maybe, with the most evil wizard of our time on the rampage, that secrecy is required now and then? That you may have to show a bit of patience for this all to make sense? You are twenty two years old, act your age! ”

It was here, as Pomphrey gave her a thorough dressing down, that Aurora noticed the strain on the school matron’s wrinkled face. The weariness, the whitening of her hair since Aurora had left school. The stress and the fraught emotional state of a normally strict but measured woman told its own story. The cost of this civil turmoil was etched across her face. Aurora struggled to think of a proper response to her accusations, chastened by the Pomphrey’s strident riposte. 

“Honestly, I have no idea why I help sometimes. As it so happens, if you are so angry at Dumbledore, then you are in luck. Did you tell her, Rubeus, that Dumbledore wants to meet her?”

“He said I was leaving once you’d…” started Aurora, but Pomphrey cut her off with a turn of her finger. 

“Well….I meant leaving to see Dumbledore. Hadn’t really got round to saying it though” said Hagrid, a little hesitantly.

There was an extended pause in the conversation, a lapse as Aurora stared at the ground, trying to stifle tears of embarrassment and frustration, whilst Pomphrey continued to steam as Hagrid fiddled irritably with his beard.

“Rubeus, thank you ever so much for your assistance” said Madam Pomphrey, in a sweetened tone. “You all know how much we admire your contributions in these times. Do you have any urgent business to attend to?”

“Hippogriffs af’er lunch to look after, but no rush,” replied Hagrid. 

“Good. Then would you mind taking Aurora here to see Professor Dumbledore?”

Aurora moved to the door, but Pomphrey caught her wrist and pulled her back. 

“After I discharge you,” she said firmly. “Rubeus, sorry you had to endure all of that, but would you mind waiting outside for now, before escorting Aurora to his office?”

Hagrid nodded before shuffling out the door, ducking as he left the absurdly furnished closet. His footsteps echoed on the hard wooden floor, as he moved into the main wing of the hospital to wait.

Ignoring the sounds of Hagrid clumsily pulling out a chair in the room nearby, Pomphrey turned back to Aurora. Her voice reverted back to the stern disciplinarian tones of minutes earlier. 

“I need to check the wounds before you leave,” she said.

“But they’re all gone,” said Aurora

“It’s a matter of routine; you can’t leave until I have done so.”

Aurora rolled back her head in frustration and then pulled up her shirt.

“I am going to have to inspect the rib cage and chest impacts again, you’re going to have to take it off I am afraid.”

With reluctance Aurora removed her shirt, and stood there, bare-chested and feeling rather humiliated. Wearing nothing other than pyjama shorts identical in design to those given to injured schoolchildren; she stood on the spot in silence. Madam Pomphrey scanned her vanished wounds, forensically looking for any abnormalities. Her wand would light up every so often as she tapped parts of her body. 

Aurora was thankful she made no remark over the numerous scars that had previously formed on her body from rock climbing or caving in the Far East, but she could not be anything other than uncomfortable as her exposed body was assessed in surgical detail. 

Pomphrey then turned Aurora’s head to one side, and brushed her wand against the cuts on her neck, before giving her body a final scan. Once satisfied, she pointed with her wand to the pile of clothes, which were now resting on the chair that had previously hosted Hagrid’s immense bulk. 

“Here, these were sent from home. Meet Hagrid outside the door when you’re changed.”

She then left back to her office without another word. 

Aurora inspected the clothes. Taken from her parents’ house, she cringed at the difference in style to her current attire. Her tastes had changed completely from the colourful array of fabric and denim in front of her. Nonetheless, she put on the clothes as quickly as she could, not wanting to remain exposed topless for much longer. 

Hagrid was waiting for her outside the closet; his demeanour remained surprisingly tolerant, as he sat in the hospital wing outside the door.

The hospital wing was empty aside from two students, both fast asleep, their sickly faces glistening in the midday sun. The appearance of the room was identical to the ward she had visited on too many occasions at Hogwarts, largely due to the idiocy of her misdemeanours, or the failings of her friends in their unorthodox school careers. Its barrel--hole ceiling and plain ornamentation remained, whilst its polished tiled floor remained as loud under foot as ever.

Though Hagrid tried to break the tension, smiling weakly every so often as they walked together out of the hospital wing, Aurora couldn’t bring herself to smile back. 

She was ashamed of how she had raged at him, and as insufferable as Madam Pomphrey had been, she was correct in her assessments of Aurora’s shortcomings. This fuelled her with embarrassment, to go alongside the bubbling frustration that lingered inside of her at the confusion of the current situation.

As they went through the first corridor, the bell rang, and as Aurora looked at her watch, she recalled from her long abandoned timetables that lunchbreak had just begun. The paintings around, largely sombre and dotted with slovenly beings looking to rest their eyes, awoke irritably.

One, Aurora recognised, of a pompous, ginger witch on a broom gave her a cheery wave, whilst another, the mad knight known colourfully as Sir Cadigan or “The Cad” to the majority of pupils, began to charge across the walls. He bellowed “Pupils arriving! Make haste, make haste!” as he sped to the floors below. 

Every so often Hagrid would make a sound as if wanting to initiate conversation but Aurora would always look away. After descending a few flights of stairs they heard the sound of students emerge into the corridors nearby.

It had been surreal to pass through Hogwarts with its corridors empty, as if visiting the site like a museum of antiquities, but what was more unusual to her was the behaviour of the students who arrived from their classes for lunch. For the most part they paid no notice to her, but the dichotomy in their moods was remarkable. Many passed her, heads down, in an almost procession-like manner, their tones funereal. Others were obliviously joyful and knots of first years ran passed her to the Great Hall.

What was constant was the chatter, the conversations about one person in particular: Greyback. As uncomfortable as this made her, luckily, as hard as she tried she was unable to recognise any of the students from her school days. An observation solodified by the fact no NEWT students were to be found on her sample walk to the Head's study. 

They took a winding path to the office, Hagrid noticeably trying to avoid the more popular areas of the school, he took her down a route through corridors she wasn’t sure she had ever ventured. 

Eventually, they reached the stone gargoyle, and Hagrid, his voice hoarse and somewhat croaky after a long extended period of vocal inaction, turned to the sculpted beast and said “Wait a ‘mo”.

The gargoyle gave a smirk as Hagrid fumbled through the deep pockets on his moleskin coat.

“Hold on” he murmured. 

After a few jingles and rattles of keys, and the rustling of various strands of paper, he pulled out a green furred notebook and flicked through to the back page. Peering at his untidy scrawl he said “I got it”.

Turning back to amused gargoyle he said “Custard Cream?”

Giving a nod, the door in the wall turned inwards. 

There was another awkward pause as Hagrid shuffled on the spot. They still hadn’t spoken since the confrontation earlier. 

Without another moment of hesitation, Aurora turned to Hagrid and hugged him once more. She tried to express all that she could in this second embrace with the gamekeeper she had earned the trust and friendship off for seven years at Hogwarts. Hagrid, somewhat relieved at the break in tension, patted her on the back,

“Yer a good girl, Rory” he said, “I’ll see you soon as I can alright.”

“Sure” said Aurora. 

Leaving Hagrid behind at the foot of the stairs to Dumbledore’s office, she went up the staircase of winding stone and reached the oak panelled door at the top. She paused to gain composure, and stalled before reaching for the gold knocker. 

She was fluttering with nerves, aware of the stature of the man she was about to meet for the first time since her teens, and the genuine possibility that he may finally have answers to some of the questions plaguing her thoughts.

After allowing herself a minute to become fully clam, she gave the door a firm knock. 

“Enter,” said Dumbledore.. 

She stepped into his office, Circular in shape, it stood as it had always done, utterly unchanged. The ornate shelves of neatly filed books wrapped around the walls, harmonising with the carousel of paintings that climbed up to the top of the ceiling.

The scrolls and glass cabinet at one side of the room was still there, alongside the empty perch for his phoenix, Fawkes, which stood to the left of the door. The elaborate instruments and curiosities, dotted on various stands near his desk, also appeared in their pristine, untouched condition. 

More importantly, Dumbledore, remained. Seeing Aurora enter, he stood up from his desk and greeted her with an arm across her shoulder.

“Aurora, how are you?” he said, his tone sympathetic and sombre. 

“Fine” she replied, a little too quickly.

“Yes,” he said, peering at her with his intense blue eyes, magnified by his half-moon spectacles. Studying her like a specimen in a test tube, there was an uncomfortable delay before he said, “Please take a seat, I am sure you have plenty of questions."

Aurora obliged, but as she made to speak, Dumbledore raised a hand and said, “If I may, I thought I would say this before we begin. You might be glad to know, your companion, Dr Morgan made it back home to his daughter. Though he remains a little shaken he is otherwise fine. I expect he will attend the funeral in a few days’ time.”

“That’s good,” said Aurora, not overly interested in that development. At least, not right now.

“I realise the last few days may have troubled you. Please understand we came to your aid largely on the grounds of insuring your safety.”

“You don’t trust St Mungo’s?”

“It’s less to do with trust, than circumstance. There are, I suspect, two Death Eaters in one of the wards.”

“Posing as injured?”

“No, healers aren’t easy to fool. They really are hurt, but Death Eaters can be a very opportunistic bunch. The two I am referring to are, unfortunately, rather remarkable wizards. I have not the proof required to get them sent them to Azakaban.”

“Do you still need proof?” asked Aurora, bitterly.

“For now, yes," said Dumbledore in a voice that brushed through any of her sarcastic insincerity. "The Ministry may have become a reactive beast, but I will always remain the same. They are spies, not killers, though when they work for such a cause the difference is only minimal.”

“So why worry about me staying there?”

“You will have become a marked witch after that altercation. The Ministry may have obscured your involvement for their own purposes, but word travels fast. I am convinced that at least one of the wizards I met on the train sells information for money. Not to Death Eaters, but to others. Others who have no real moral obligation to be discrete.”

As Aurora mused over this, Fawkes appeared through an open window. After giving Dumbledore an affectionate nip, he flew to his perch and sat majestically still. The paintings meanwhile had awoken from their after-lunch siestas in an effort to listen in on the intriguing conversation below them. 

Dumbledore continued, “St Mungo’s is a rather valuable place for Lord Voldemort to have an ear. If you had stayed there, I have no doubt that word of your whereabouts would have been passed on. The conqueror of Fenrir Greyback is a title that brings an unfortunate level of attention.”

“What will happen to him?”

“Greyback? Oh he will stand trial in a week. Though how long he will stay in Azkaban is anyone’s guess, with the dementors abandoning their posts, the sentence may be little more than a gesture.”

“But I am a target?”

“Not yet, and hopefully not for a while longer…”

Dumbledore said this almost ruefully, his face had taken the shape of a forlorn mariner, his eyes filled with regret at this development. 

“Is my family safe?”

“No more than any other in this time. Only recently did one of the Bones’ children go missing, and I don’t think Mr Burke on Knockturn Alley packed up to go on holiday. The question is whether you are less safe. Your family hide their house well, behind walls of ancient enchantments. Right now, your father remains, as we say, a big enough fish to protect you there.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know if the Ministry has been infiltrated, which makes it all very uncertain, but your father has enough trusted contacts to keep everything under control, as long as he keeps his head down.”

“Are you going to track Voldemort’s spies?” trying to divert the conversation from such a morbid, unarguable reality. 

“Perhaps,” replied Dumbledore, impressed at Aurora’s ability to say his name without even a glimmer of trepidation. 

“You have spies there too, don’t you?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment.” 

His remark was complimented with a laugh, though it was made in no doubt that he was firm on the matter. What she realised too was that as this conversation developed the usual lightness, the typical whimsy and flourishes of Dumbledore’s speech were entirely absent. It was him, but his usual demeanour had been stripped away, revealing a determined warrior in its place. Though he still looked upon Aurora with a rare level of kindness, and despite his rebuttals, encouraged her to speak more. 

“Professor, what happened to Rupert?”

She asked this question as calmly as she could, but her words were caught in her throat and she felt an intense pressure build as she fought back more tears.

“Ah” said Dumbledore, once again observing Aurora with intense precision. “I will tell you what I can. Your brother was found in London. Where, precisely, I am not sure myself. The Ministry explanation of accidental spell damage is both highly unsatisfactory and suspicious. Cover-ups, of course, remain a rather crucial method for the Ministry, in times such as these, but their inability to give a convincing lie tells its own tale.”

She didn’t even challenge Dumbledore on how he knew this, at times his knowledge was extensive to the point of seeming omniscience. 

“Bastards, did they think they could get away with that explanation?”

“They don’t need to explain their behaviour, Aurora. Ultimately, they think people won’t want to know the truth. It’s being referred to as an accident. Who would want to challenge that, considering the implications it could bring?”

“You think they did it?”

“No, not directly at least…Though they may have been wilfully blind or deeply inept   
in regards to your brother’s safety.” 

“Which means?”

“It is possible he made enemies at the Ministry. He worked in Magical Law enforcement, with a father in the Wizengamot taking deeply unpopular positions. Being in favour of due process, trials and regulations on Auror behaviour during such heightened times of tension makes you a controversial figure. It is fair to say the son of Gideon Meadows would present an opportunity for people to vent their hysteric ire. ”

Dumbledore noted these observations with a bitterness than Aurora had never heard stem from his mouth. 

“More pressingly, Rupert worked to track down Death Eaters and law breakers. His father, your father, helped to convict them. The Ministry is compromised, that is no doubt. It is too big for Voldemort to control completely, but his designs for it are there to see.”

Aurora took his words in, before asking, “So you think Rupert could have been killed by Death Eaters, and then corrupt officials covered it up?

“It’s not impossible. Nor is it impossible that some aggrieved family member of a victim of Voldemort came along and killed him in a fit of rage.”

“So why haven’t you confronted people about this, you know the Minister of Magic after all?” 

“I have had to tread carefully, as have all of those who’ve been assisting me. The morgue did not surrender his body for two weeks, and when your parents received it his clothes and any evidence along with it, including his wand, had been taken.”

“And my family accepted this?”

“Gideon is a smart man. He knows he can’t protest too loudly. It would cause too much of a scene. He is working on things quietly behind the scenes, but don’t underestimate his determination.”

“And no one is outraged about what happened? My father’s “contacts” and friends just let it be, do they?”

“People don’t ask as they don’t wish to know. No one is prepared to discuss anything with anyone. Don’t you understand Aurora? Everyone suspects each other. No one knows who to talk to, where to look, or whom to ask. The trouble with one spy in the Ministry is that it puts everyone under suspicion. Unfortunately, I am sure that there is certainly more than one spy in the Ministry.”

“Then fight them, if corruption is such an issue?”

“The Ministry is too big and the truth is still too uncertain, Aurora. The full influence Voldemort has over them is hard to determine. ”

She let out a mirthless laugh at Dumbledore’s words. Despite sensing her dismay at these revelations, Dumbledore pressed on knowing more had to be said. 

“What matters more are the limitations of such an organisation. It is a factor that is worse than corruption. It is the different problem of desire and fear. Few of us have rxperience of this sort of chaos. Many, including the Minister, prefer to bury their head in the sand out of fear. It may shock you, even as the evil nature of Lord Voldemort has been exposed, that in the past year that people remain in denial over his true self. There are those baying for blood, but also people who sue for a peace that would be intolerable.”

“Have you spoken to Crouch then? He seems to want to get a hand on things.”

“I don’t trust Crouch.”

“You trusted my father, though?”

“Yes.But you can’t trust everyone at the Ministry.”

It was then, that the truth slowly dawned on her.

“You were working with Rupert, weren’t you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You were working with Rupert, my father, and others in the Ministry” Aurora said, her eyes lighting up at her realisations. “Still are, I imagine, and Hagrid is to do with it. Hence the fact he was watching me as part of a shift. You’re trying to infiltrate the Ministry to take on Voldemort aren’t you?”

Dumbledore paused for a moment, and then smiled, almost uncomfortably, impressed with her reasoning.

“Rupert was a wonderful young man and a brilliant wizard. Yes, he and I had established a relationship of sorts. I have done the same with many others, including your father. In fact, I have established contacts, relationships with people in all sorts of places in the Wizarding World, particularly in Britain. This conflict has escalated from disappearances and rogue thugs, to uprisings, and now to a conflict that can only be described as a civil war. I have done all I can to unite those with the backbone to see this problem for what it is.”

“Which is?”

“This war is a consequence not just of Lord Voldemort, but the wider prejudices of our own society. It won’t end until people from every part of the magical world are on our side. Voldemort has been more successful in his ambitions than many have realised, but we still have the chance to change that.”

“Am I here for recruitment?”

“No. You are here because you deserved answers and my gratitude.”

“Do you not trust me?”

“It isn’t about trust. You need to think through a decision like that, it can’t be made on a call of emotion. At the very least, give yourself time to return home first.”

“What was my brother doing with you?”

“That was between me and him.”

“I thought you said I deserved answers.”

“There are some things I can’t say”

“But Professor….”

“All I can do is promise I will do everything I can to find out the truth. Everything will make sense when we discover what went wrong.”

It was Dumbledore at his worst, enigmatic, charming, and concealing himself behind a bay of secrets.

“I still deserve to know.”

“In time, trust me, Aurora, it will be good for you to wait. I know no one ever likes being told that, but wait for the funeral, talk it through with your family. Wait for us to find out what happened. It is one of my top priorities.”

She wanted to stand up and scream. She was convinced Dumbledore was concealing far more from her than he was letting on. However, if she couldn’t trust Dumbledore, then she couldn’t trust anyone.

Deciding to give him a chance and realising she could make through her plan of action in the next few days, she gave a curt nod to Dumbledore before fixing him with a watery stare.

“Professor,” she started, “Rupert is dead, and I don’t blame you, but you have a responsibility to find out all you possibly can.”

“I know.”

Dumbledore then pulled open a draw on his desk and pulled out a box. It was unremarkable in complexion, constructed of treated black leather. Before opening it he started conversation once more.

“This may not be the time to say it Miss Meadows, but I have had regular correspondence from your supervisor in China, Dr Merryfeather. He and I have been good friends for almost five decades. He told me of how you enchanted the Zheivang Lakes. That was an extraordinary piece of magic.”

“I never knew that.”

“Well, he is a rather withdrawn man at the best times, it must be said. I also heard of the discoveries you found in the Elian tombs. It may seem like an issue of little import now, but in time, those findings will outlive all that we are doing here. As a former teacher of yours, I can only say I am immensely proud of what you have done with your life so far.”

Aurora felt embarrassed by the praise, particularly because it swelled within her to the point that she began feeling rather too fulfilled at her own abilities. 

As she sat there flattered, Dumbledore turned his attention back to the box and said: 

“I also wondered, if you could help me?”

He clicked open the clasp of the box and pulled out a silver orb.

“What is it?” said Aurora.

“Well what do you think?”

“Hmmm….

She took the orb. It was silver, though not of design, instead that was the hue of the vapour filling an otherwise clear ball of glass. Attached to the sphere was an elaborate gold rim that was unfurnished with any runes or information. The rim was constructed of gold leaf. 

“It’s a memory charm” she deduced, studying the glowing mist, “you can tell from the patterns of the swirls. Part of a larger piece. Probably custom made. The interesting thing about it though, is that it is maybe imbued with a Nocturna charm.”

“A Nocturna Charm?”

“Yes, exceptionally rare and remarkably old spell,” she said. 

“May I?” she then inquired, pointing at Dumbledore’s wand. 

He obliged and Aurora tapped the globe with the piece of wood. She was surprised by the swiftness of the piece in her hand, a white wand with a handle unlike any she had seen before. 

“The charm has become dormant” she noted. “Though, if catalysed, I am guessing it would have something to do with dreams, comparable to a pensieve even.”

Every time she hit it with her wand, it made a sound but the colour stayed the same.

“Really?”

"Yes, and if it was functioning the vapours would have changed colour when I hit it. Professor why do you need to know this? Where did you get it?”

“Truthfully,” he said, chuckling “I obtained it very recently. I was optimistic I knew what it was. I was afraid I had to disappoint myself.”

Aurora wasn’t convinced by his explanation, but let the matter pass. 

“Now,” said Dumbledore, finally, “it is time for you to go home I think.”

“I think so too,” replied Aurora wearily.

“I will see you,” he said, “in a few days at the funeral. Please bear in mind what I have said to you today. We will find out what has happened to your brother, and when you’re ready, you can make all the decisions you need to about your future.”

Aurora met these remarks with a tentative smile, attempting to conceal the doubts she ad over the matter. Whatever Dumbledore was saying now, her mind was made up. 

Despite the warnings he had given her, she was going to Diagon Alley after the funeral and she would solve the mystery of her brother, regardless of whatever consequences the Death Eaters wished to impose on her for her defeat of Greyback. 

“Dumbledore,” she said, using his name for the first time, “what happened to Greyback’s accomplices?”

“On the train?” he said, a little surprised at the question, “oh don’t worry. The Ministry found them too.”

“And, is Ollivander still in business?”

“Of course. Just be careful when it comes to getting a new wand. The wand chooses the wizard, and you may find the results surprising.” 

“So”, he continued, “Mr Filch will be down by the gates, you can apparate from there. I will have to be off as well now. Pip pip.”

Dumbledore then left the office without another word. Fawkes, his charismatic phoenix gave an irritated hoot that Aurora discerned as an assertive request for her to leave. 

She scanned the study once more, marvelling at being alone in such a room. Then she headed down to the grounds, letting her conversation with Dumbledore, easily the longest she had had with him in her life, echo around her skull.

One thing continued to trouble her. It was about the orb. It was a powered with complicated spell, but even if Dumbledore was unaware of a Nocturna charm, and its purpose, she was pretty sure he would have been skilled enough to deduce its properties. Flitwick could have mastered the mystery of the orb in a handful of seconds. She thought Dumbledore must have been testing her somehow.

She then departed the room, meeting a typically abrasive Filch down at the school gates. There Aurora apparated back to the West Country, nervous at meeting her parents for the first time in almost four years.


	6. A Hollow Grave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora returns home to Nelson Hall, and the funeral of her brother begins in earnest. Through two bouts of inexplicable good luck, she finally develops the leads she needs to investigate his death and to make sense of the chaos around her.

An unusual quirk of family life was being introduced to people you’d never otherwise meet.

In the case of Rupert, this sentiment was a rather morbid pronouncement on Aurora’s perceived fallibility. Only in his passing had she realised just how inferior she was in almost every conceivable important way to him. His better nature, his moral assertiveness, his warmth, and his persistence in writing to her despite her obvious disdain for his worthy life choices. They were all antidotes to her bitter envy.

As his casket had been lowered into the manually dug grave, personally cut out by her solemn-faced father earlier on this frost-ridden winter morn, she knew that they were burying more than his body. They were burying part of her too. They were closing down a link to the idyllic, pleasant notions her childhood, and of the better side of the magical condition.

They were putting to rest the fanciful notion that the war could leave any family untouched. 

It had taken her younger brother from her. They were forced to consign him to the ground, never to return from the earth again. 

She had rejected any chance to see her brother’s body, unmarked and posed as if sleeping, before the funeral began, as the pain would have been too much. Her attitude, however, amongst the gathering, remained defiantly stoical.

Sentiment was never Aurora’s forte. Though as the four pall bearers, nameless ministerial friends of her father whom in more humorous times she would refer to cynically as “Brown-Nosers” and “Career-Prospects-Seekers” patted down the dirt on top of the coffin, memories of Rupert had overwhelmed her.

It was recollections of his smile and of days spent on broomsticks in the apple orchard that rose from the morgue of her long distant memory. Whilst the absurd penguin Patronus that Aurora taught him in Fourth Year and his passionate defences of muggles also came to the fore of her rememberances.

On other days these reflections would make her burst with pride, today they sickened her. For so long they had been close, but Aurora, in her impatience to put her magical talents first, had abandoned him. She had ran away from any impending dark to live her own fantasies elsewhere, to take part in her notions of adventure away from the bleakness of her home country.

He had stayed. Never to be seen by her again.

His finally resting place was now beside his wife, Stacey, a local muggle he had known since childhood and had married years later. She had died mere months ago, only two years into their marriage: murdered. Their relationship together was a rekindling of a bond that Aurora remembered from long ago, back when they were friends with muggle children in the area. TO her shame, Aurora hadn't seen Stacey since, now she was part of the dirt.

Aurora had been so occupied in her own life that she even thought that she might have been called Tracey. The destruction of the unbreakable; of the private union of two people through what was clearly earnest love made her throat harden even more.

It also added a black irony to the sombre proceedings. The position of his grave, beside that of his recently deceased wife, Stacey Meadows, whom he had been ever so close to, was a grisly joke in and of itself. Courtesy of their deaths, they were a match made in heaven yet again.

Aurora had resisted her perverse feelings of selfish disenchantment as she listened to a long-standing family friend start proceedings. She had squinted throughout most of it in the low light of the solstice sun as friends of Rupert, often from the Ministry, but also from Hogwarts, came up to the podium before the rows of chairs to say their respects.

She knew most of them, but in that hour, their names escaped her like the pall-bearers' had done. 

The cemetery field was a poppy plane in warmer times, though the eroded florae only emphasised the austere beauty of the imposing stone that marked the graves of muggles and wizards alike, buried in the rolling hills above Wavelock. The icy sheen of dew marked the footprints of the smartly dressed attendees, glistening in the light of the sun.

For a protective precaution, the cemetery had been charmed with spells to deflect any nosey or rambling, wayfaring muggles from joining the company - magic that Aurora had dutifully assisted in. Stacey being an orphan had made all of this simpler from a logistical point of view, and through a measure of guilt Aurora felt she would be the closest thing Stacey would have to a representative, having known and forgotten her years ago. 

From the start to finish she had sat in the front row, garbed in a dress.

Not a robe, but a black dress.

The first dress she had worn since she was twelve. When it was her turn to say her piece on her brother, she had stepped up in front of the crowd, not taking in the faces looking up at her sorrowful figure, before commencing with the most difficult speech of her life.

If she had looked around, and not just at the wooden platform built in front of the crowd, she would have seen quite an array. Family friends for a start, from the squib down the road to the two or three wizard families nearby. Dumbledore was there too, in his silver spectacles, and amongst him companions of her father such as Mad-Eye, Kingsley and Dedalus Diggle. Ministry heads were there, nameless to her in this current stage of Aurora’s emotional odyssey. There were school mates and friends of Rupert Meadows from Hogwarts, sitting in the rows and even amongst the pack were a teacher or two. Flitwick and Rubeus Hagrid, both so fond of the Meadows’ family, looked particularly downcast at the proceedings. 

It was a hefty party in a time of such worn volatility, with a consuming uncertainty abounding the land. The safety was in groups this size, a Death Eater ambush was unlikely with such magical skill welling in one field. 

The only notable thing was that none had inquired or questioned the absence of any mention to the cause of death by any of the speakers at the funeral. Either they knew, suspecting foul play from the lack of open casket and the confused nature of its reporting, or they didn’t want to know. They preferred to silently accept the "Accidental spell damage" reasoning given.

The potential truth was perhaps too terrifying for them to delve into – a real fudge position that compromised their bravery of attending.

When she addressed them, she did so out of reluctance. 

Her mother was watching. She had greeted her return home with a warm hug, a waspish aside about her father, and a look of palpable relief at Aurora’s survival. Now she had a film of tears running down her cheeks. Her feelings for her daughter, despite her descent into a wanton isolation were always there.

Her mother may may have indulged the angered monosyllabic tendencies for the past few days as the funeral dawned on them, but as Aurora went to speak, the creasing of a smile on her face betrayed a sense of pride at her own daughter. 

It was possibly just a coping mechanism for the deep grief, though what struck Aurora was the only time her mother's voice returned to the force and colour from years ago was when she told Aurora to speak at the funeral. Otherwise she said, she’d regret it for the rest of her life.

Over the previous night, before finally agreeing to, she had analysed her mother’s words and her drifting away from the magical world as her father found his new wife - his job, and she found in the bottles of alcohol a new husband and emotional crux. 

The war had made her behaviour worse, and broke up the family perhaps for good, behind the blankets of societal decency.

Though the withdrawal of her mother from the world and the break up from Gideon were both issues that existed before the mess that had now surrounded them all.

As Dumbledore had said, the war was spearheaded by pure evil, but the causes that enabled it to thrive had been deep set for years. Her mother, Elizabeth Meadows, was the perfect embodiment of that. 

At first she had tried to thank people in her few minutes. She had never been a good public speaker, but her compliments to her brother felt broken and caustically fragmented by the wounds of his demise. Originally, Aurora had no ambition to give much of herself away to a pack of saints, martyrs, and the defeated. Who knows who was a fraud in such company, or a spy, and besides, why did they deserve to know of her fragility?

To her surprise, however, it had then flowed out of her. She spoke of his uncompromised notions of right and wrong and how they sparkled in contrast to the dirge and amorality of her behaviour and temperament. He, as the best of all of them, as her brother, had never earned her disdain.

This came out first through her body language, but then in content. She told stories, no humour found or intended, in their games of gobstones or of cosmic imagination in the garden. As little kids they would pretend to be mermaids and fish, and would fight monsters in cupboards. Monsters more concealed and phantom like than the ones they even faced now. She spoke of their love of the gramophone upstairs in the house and of her mother’s music box. Aurora told them how even if she had forgotten this in her futile endeavours abroad; he made the world, which was often a hard one to live in, so much brighter. Then when her speech stopped, its content oozing out of her, flowing from the emotional pores of her body, reverberating in her conflicted soul, she sat down again, oddly more at ease with herself.

She turned to look at her mother once more, as she sat isolated across the row. Someday in the next few weeks, Aurora would talk to her and try and mend whatever she could.

Aurora herself had managed just enough resilience to hold back her own tears. Though she had been shaken enough to not notice how the crowd responded to her words. She had returned to her seat allowing the final few farewells to wash over her like an oncoming tide. Her father, Gideon, had then given his few words in his recognisable baritone, which remained powerfully restrained.

Then it was all over. 

And now, Aurora found herself in the living room of her house as two dozen or so people remained, sharing a quiet drink in memory of Rupert Meadows. Her mother had retired to her room and many others had also taken the chance to leave. They had all returned home in organised packs, wands held firmly under jackets as they determinedly set off from various portkeys. 

Even Hagrid had to go, he was urgently needed to check on some of the wild game in the forest. Flitwick left too. All he had communicated, in his most pleasing voice, was how proud he was of his two fellow Ravenclaws, her and Rupert. His emotions did not permit him to say much more.

They had both gone with several others back to Hogsmeade.

In and amongst that party was Albus Dumbledore. Despite their extended conversation only days earlier, and the feeling he had more to tell her than he had, he had returned without stopping to say a word other than his condolences to Aurora's mother. It was possible he had perhaps seen the need to not linger, a point hammered home by how Gideon, her father, set Albus a venomous look every time he was in the room, his eyes boring into Albus’ with a strong suggestion of incandescent rage. 

Now was not the time to settle that score.

Nelson Hall, where the Meadows' lived, was a grand old building, of a weary beauty and travelled stone composition. Magically supported by old timber beams, it set its place in the scrubs and marshes of the rural tranquillity of the West Country. Surrounding it were a scattering of trees, rising from the mud, and graceful, arching knolls that engulfed the house in a valley. It was built seven hundred years ago and originally belonged to an ancient pure blood line that was now diluted. This was an event that caused much chagrin less than a century ago through two wizard-muggle marriages.

The Nelsons, one of the traditionally noblest houses of Wizarding Society, had built Nelson Hall as their second home, to compliment their lavish London house that was now owned by a more sinister pure-blood family, the Lestranges.

Blessed with protective features, these were a gift to the Meadows because if it were found by the people of a certain disposition, it would be the perfect symbol of blood-traitor to arson or destroy. 

It possessed enchantments that obscured it from view and protected it when the banks of the nearby rivers which burst and flooded the surrounding area.

In a fashion that was eerily beautiful, their house, garden and orchard also intact, would sit as a small island in a sea of glistening water. During occasions of flooding, the family would even go out on a rowing boat across the marshes or invite their friends around and play quidditch over what looked like an ocean. Aurora was rubbish at flying, Rupert wasn’t much better, but when the better players came around, she would cheat with her wand to keep the broom stable, or if this was before Hogwarts, she would consciously do it without one.

When her mother, a tremendous Hufflepuff chaser in her day, whom was suspicious at seeing anyone fly so well with such haphazard technique, had discovered this, her feelings were telling. She treated her reckless use of underage magic with the expected parental words of caution and anger – but she found it hard to hide the amazement at how her magical ability was able to cover for her inability to fly.

Less whimsically, it also possessed a secret tunnel. An escape out of the marshland that exited at the nearby postcard-friendly village of Wavelock, a predominantly muggle dwelling that sat below the cemetery they had all just attended. 

It was also impossible to apparate to, and of course, Gideon had complimented its structures with spells that he hadn’t revealed to Aurora, despite her superior ability with charm work.

Inside the house echoed with history. Old portraits adorned the walls of wizards from yesteryear, and a library beholden to ornate shelves of books that would make a bibliophile blush dominated the west wing of the building. Much of the archaic furniture was covered in blankets, with numerous rooms unused, though their carpets and oak floorboards scrubbed tirelessly pristine by the three dwindling house elves in residence. 

Aurora, since she had arrived home, to a house that was now for the most part, dimly lit in the winter dark, tried her best to ignore the haunting trademarks of her brother and the absence of others. The fact that doors were no longer left constantly ajar, or that the library was no longer filled with his tuneful signing voice, were wounds in her side. Other more permanent relics of his time here, such as the height marks pencilled in on one of the upstairs walls, remained. Her parents, she imagined, had chosen not to venture to his room at the back of his house, except perhaps to forensically search it for clues. She doubted her father would have lingered over any sentiments. 

The murmur of restrained conversation was like an intolerable buzz in Aurora’s ear. The banality of their trite conversations, despite the importance of many of the characters residing in the house was astounding to her. 

She bathed this semi-functioning social dynamic in, as she mulled over the uneasy cohesion of conversation on a day such as this, thinking between sips of alcohol.

For appearances sake, a request this time of her father, she went to this after-gathering rather than retiring straight to her room. It was a request she accepted not due to any profound emotional reasoning, but simply because she was too tired for another row with him.

The truth was when it came to discovering what happened to her brother; she had no idea where to start.

She knew his death was most likely caused by magic, somewhere in London, and that it was probably very suspicious. She knew this due to the nature of the world at this time, due to the hushed confusion and complications in returning his body and lastly due to what Dumbledore had said to her. It was most likely either snatchers and thugs, a bitter lone wolf, or worse, a Death Eater, that was responsible.

She was convinced her father knew more, but since she had returned home she had had no luck on that score. Her father had not told her a thing.

She had arrived from the rain as soon as her talk with Dumbledore had ended, to parents contesting two residing emotions, both dealing with the bubbling complications in a way that only grieving family members can.

At first she experienced her mother greeting her with an uncharacteristically warm embrace and a beaming positivity that she had not seen from her for so long. Though within minutes she turned to a more morose disposition, aided by the recent grief and the general decline of her handle on reality. Her father, meanwhile, had greeted her somewhat coldly, only offering some concern about her injuries. No mention, by either of them was made about Greyback, or her brother, for that matter.

That first evening was permeated by silence, the only cheery word coming from the one of the three house elves. Bodie, who saw her return to the house as something of a second coming was as genial as ever. He had always held her in high regard, perhaps due to her unorthodox ability to treat them as beings rather than slaves, but also out of hope that the often remembered, reckless, happy-go-lucky type of character that she could so often be might bring back positivity to the drab climate of Nelson Hall. 

He was wrong on that count, and when dinner came, with her parent, both sitting at opposite ends of the table, only together for appearance, it had exploded into a vicious argument.

They had slept separately for seven years, but now things had receded even more. Elizabeth now largely lived in the annexe, Gideon meanwhile, routinely took flight to his office and the living room fire. The rest of the house remained an abandoned, shadowy, unvisited neutral ground except for the dining room, which acted almost like a half-way house they occasionally visited together. 

When Aurora had pressed her father on what was going on at Ministry, he had deflected. When she had reassured her mother, whom responded with a weak smile, that her injuries had healed, she noted the few bitter comments her father made about her recklessness and her poor decision to come home.

When she had then challenged his critique of her wishing to pay respects to her only brother, he had snapped. He angrily, in a voice uncharacteristically tempered with a fury that was the antithesis of the polite but courteously principled demeanour that had seen him through most of Aurora’s childhood, called her a fool for coming back.

He had said to her, that for a girl from Ravenclaw House, she was remarkably unintelligent. This was a comment she could not have imagined him saying five years ago, when she had been possibly her father’s favourite.

Clearly her leaving, followed by the confusion, stress and outbreak of war had created shaped an unholy symphony in his mind. One that, with the loss of his son, had altered his outlook on the matter. After wishing she hadn’t left, he now felt, out of both bitterness and also a sense of protection, that she was wrong to come back. 

Unfortunately he expressed it badly. 

He told her she had taken on more than she could chew, that she had failed to keep up the appearances needed to survive, and that she shouldn’t be fooled by any indulging by Dumbledore, he was a fool if he saw to trust her with anything. 

At that point, Aurora dropped any pretence, and said she wanted to help fight as part of the resistance, and figure out what happened to her brother.

Her father had then thrown his chair to the ground and screamed at her. Mad at her, echoing his insecurities through finding suggestions in her speech. He accused her of thinking he hadn’t tried, or of thinking him a coward, and not giving him the respect.

It was very unlike him. At that point he even ordered her not to leave the house, or to get a wand again until things were settled. She had no intention of fulfilling either of those orders, though she took all his rampaging grief, expressed intimately through his criticisms of her, as philosophically as could. She was aware she would cry about it in her room later, but for now she asked, for the last time, if he would allow her to help.

To help, she meant in any way - with the case, or with the grief.

No, he had said, you can’t damn help.

Throughout this, her mother remained withdrawn, only responding by leaving the table quietly as Gideon punched through a wall. 

Aurora was powerless to change this, and didn’t expect her mother to wade in, for whatever power Aurora possessed, she was helpless at stopping her mother’s slide over the past few years from her former self. It all added into her overriding feeling, that once the grieving reached its denouement, she was useless, when it coming to gluing the remnants of her family together, or finding the truth out about her brother. 

She had found little use for her curse breaking skills, which felt so antiquated in the home she had returned too. There were no ancient scrolls to translate, few charms to discern from haunted ruins and manipulate and no requirement for inventive curses to break through old secrets that were supposed to remain secrets forever.

The brutal reality was that the menace consuming them was a present one, bereft from such traditional forms of wizarding struggle and advancement. All that echoed through these plagued thoughts was that Aurora, if the quirks of family life were correct, was lucky to have met Rupert. 

In the case of Dorcas meanwhile, family life had meant meeting someone unerringly boring. 

As she returned for more alcohol, still very much going over the funeral in her mind, Dorcas approached from the circles of conversers in the living room. Back from London for the funeral, she was her cousin whom, for reasons beyond her own comprehension, decided to spell her surname differently out of a possible penchant for Saxon ancestry quirks (a hangover of her teenage dabbling with coven magic and wiccans).

The occult strands to her magical interests had been a fun rumour at school, and the deterioration of her parent’s marriage in pantomime style had given the impression of a wacky, freebird offspring lying in roost. How disappointing it had been then that since her father’s brother’s child had dwelt in Nelson Hall, she had given off the demeanour of a brow-beaten bookkeeper. 

She was only eighteen now, fresh out of Hogwarts, two years the junior of the dearly departed and four years younger than Aurora. She had been flitting in and out of life with the family for a while.

Since the age of eleven to be precise, when her mother, a madcap potioneer, decide to abandon society for a cult of vampires in Skegness. She had joined a well-hidden order of skin-biters gathered together in an old castle, protected by enchantments, and permitted to exist courtesy of their long-standing, covert support from two vampires high up in Ministry circles. Aurora’s father had actually discovered this for himself, and to much bluster and consternation, realised he was too small in the game, even as a Wizengamot member, to take it on. 

Even before the war, such odd allegiances and weird agreements festered in the twisted branches of an overbearing, monolithic body. Whatever was said about the Quibbler, Aurora sometimes felt they had a keener eye than the Prophet on these things.

Dorcas’ father, the blood relation to Aurora, had taken his flight to the night with typical equivocation. He, an emotionally confused hippy of a wizard, had left them all for spiritual healing in Peru. Gideon, Aurora’s father, felt no need to really enquire further, and took his yearly postcard back, delivered through Muggle mail, with a consistent sense of apathy. Wearily Gideon took on the role of looking after Dorcas in the yawning chasms of time between terms at Hogwarts, sort of as a third child in the family.

The fact Aurora hadn’t even thought of her at all in the Far East was a failing of hers, though in reality, she had never given Aurora anything to think about. 

She may have had fledgling sympathy for anyone abandoned by their parents so openly, whilst hers broke apart from each other in the obscuring shade of closed curtains, but Dorcas had never sought her advice or help, and took on an attitude that varied from surly to inexpressive whenever around her. Dorcas clearly had her own reasons for disliking Aurora Meadows.

There were suggestions she was a live-wire with her friends, apparently, and an unorthodox witch, but even this seemed to have dissipated since Hogwarts. Her eccentric spelling of Meadows as “Meadowes” really acting as the only vestige of her less usual mannerisms, before she left school for a role in financial accounts at the Ministry, the monotonous hulking mammoth of an employer.

The family had mentioned this job, and her apparently dulling down, in their letters, but she had always been dull in Aurora’s mind in the first place, and she couldn’t get emotionally involved in people whom had never warmed to her at all.

They had ignored each other through the sombre service. These feelings however, were only exemplified by the strained pleasantries they now both endured together as equally strong misanthropes. 

They forcefully exchanged a few words, out of respect for the occasion, each syllable seemingly taking forever to pass from each of their lips. 

She noted her grief at the loss of their “beloved Rupert” with the insincere detachment of a Goblin financier. Aurora felt Dorcas' feelings at his “tragic loss” were delivered in the same tone as someone jotting down the figures off of a pay-slip. 

Then Dorcas slipped off elsewhere, Aurora attempted to pacify her bitterness with another (a fourth) glass of wine. Dorcas Meadowes meant nothing to her. She was the irritating punch line in a blackly humorous tale of marital strife. She had become a teenager bored out of preference, monosyllabic, ungenial, and despite her new job, she would still linger around their home from time to time, her unimaginative strain of cognition lingering in the house long after each visit. 

Perhaps it was the fact that despite her bland personality, their distant relationship to the point Aurora didn’t think of her once on the journey home (her name drawing an intentional blank whenever it cropped up in a letter), Dorcas was very pretty. And Aurora could be very bitter.

Whatever faults lay in the crazed mother of Dorcas, looks weren’t an issue. Dorcas had inherited her black hair of a silky, twirling persuasion, and also being about four inches taller that Aurora, the body of a graceful ballet dancer, slender and striking. Even if she garnished it with tastelessly banal attire, to the point her clothes stank of the miserly even at a funeral.

At least, Aurora thought, she had got over the new-age crap.

Thankfully as Aurora’s resentment of Dorcas Meadowes enjoyed its long-delayed resurgence, momentarily overwhelming the intensity of her feelings towards Rupert and her own failings, she was greeted with two bouts of insane fortune. 

Firstly, Dorcas had, unusually by her organised standards, left her wand on the side by the drinks counter as she had leant there speaking so uncomfortably to Aurora.

Secondly, she saw in the corner of her eye, beyond the grey matter of faceless hangers on at the funeral, was Mad-Eye Moody. He was walking out of the living room and across the corridor, in the direction of her father’s office.

Aurora had been unable to enter it, and her father had closed it with personalised locking spells, boarding it off from prying eyes. At this point, her father did not trust Aurora with whatever he had been doing in there the last few months.

This was her opportunity to sneak away. Taking the wand, a narrow beast of eight inches, she scuttled away from the drinks stand. She was hoping she could find a way to tamper with the charms on the door, too complicated for her to decipher and dispel without a precise instrument. Breaking through the rabble in the middle of the room, Aurora carefully followed Mad-Eye Moody out.

Before she could race away, however, her trail into the hallway, and her trail of thought for that matter, was obscured in a fashion hallmark to the last period of her life. From the thinning crowd emerged Dr Theodore Morgan, chatting to two dark-suited men Aurora didn't recognise.

He was appropriately reflective and sad-looking for the occasion. After spotting her amongst the gathering, his face lit up like a bonfire, and he picked up the pace, hoping to draw her attention.

She knew it would upset Theo, whom she did want to catch up with, despite his annoying quirks, but she just didn’t have the time for conversation.

They had developed a great bond, but she was not going to sacrifice this opportunity of Mad-Eye talking to her Dad, whom had been missing from the living room the whole while, on the altar of mournful pleasantries.

Hoping no one was watching her at this point, she walked behind a group talking to each other in a circle, and tapped herself with Dorcas’ wand, disillusioning her body.

Theo then surveyed the room for a second time, on this occasion hoping to catch her eye. His face dropped. Assuming she had gone elsewhere without seeing him, he turned back to the two Ministry colleagues he was in previous conversation with. 

She still couldn’t believe Dorcas of all people had been unobservant and forgetful enough, in a paranoid atmosphere of civil war, to leave her wand like that.

She put this thought to one side though as she entered the back of the house and its welcoming silence, only interrupted by the occasional stirs from the semi-functioning grandfather clock. 

Aurora crept across the hall. Carefully tip-toeing to the door of her father’s office. Knowing that he had locked it and charmed it against anyone listening in or hearing a sound, she wasn’t surprised to realise that no noise came from the other side of the wall. 

When she first came home, she recognised there was a spell of suggestion placed on it.

A voice in her head had kept telling her that she needed to go to the toilet, or that she had misplaced something, or that she would prefer to cook some food. It was a voice of impulsion, emanating from her own brain. It was like the spells wizards used on muggles, when they stumbled across Hogwarts, where they would then be dissuaded from exploring the seemingly old abandoned castle.

It wasn’t until the third or fourth time the spell deceived her that she had realised what was happening. Aurora had looked up the counter spell in the library and after about twenty goes, managed to do it wandlessly.

The other harms, the ones that prevented eavesdropping and her unlocking the door were too powerful to remove without a wand. 

They were pretty hard to alter with a wand as well, especially Dorcas’ holly number that was unfamiliar to her. 

She imagined that if she had altered her father's charms, which would take time, it would probably set something off, so she had another idea.

Aurora leant down in the corridor, appreciating the spectre of silence greeting her.

She held her breath, not wanting to give herself away, and pointed her wand through crack under the door, hoping the spell she was about to do would be colourless in the way she anticipated.

It was another of her custom spells “Audiate”.

Technically a memory charm, she used it when as part of her role in foreseeing dangers within tombs. She would fire a colourless, noiseless charm at a firm surface and the spell would set in a colourless pool. The pool gathered information, like a memory, though of sounds.

To this day, she was unable to make it work for visual information, and had to relay the noise through an instrument of her choice. 

She whispered it with Dorcas’ wand and the spell shot from the tip soundlessly. As the door didn’t open in discovery at her spell, she imagined it had silently and successfully hit a surface. Perhaps, the curtains in front of the eastern windows. 

Thinking of the gramophone, the artefact from her mother's past, the solitary object in a room that used to be her office, she set off up the stairs as quickly as stealth would allow her. She had not entered the barren, empty, dust-ridden room directly above Gideon's study for some time, but set to it with purpose, escaping the gathering people diffused in the living room.

The gramophone was silver, large and archaic in design. It also was blessed with fingerprints from her mother's touch. 

In too much of an excited fever for sentiment, she tapped it, so that it would relay sound from the charm below her.

Then, clenched her fist in triumph as her father’s voice sounded from the old antique.

Technically it would circumvent the spells her father had placed, as rather than eavesdropping; she was simply picking up information from the spell from a pool of magic that she had fired onto a surface in the room.

She was hearing the information third hand as it were.

With the charm in flow, she heard her father Gideon turn on the wooden floorboards below, his voice emanating through the gramophone.

Despite the occasion, Aurora let out a wry smile.


	7. Words Her Father Told Them

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even if by complete fortune, Aurora begins to make headway on the mystery demonically consuming her thoughts.

“Hmm," said her father, "I suppose it went okay. Enough stayed to keep the effect or, at least, they showed up for a little while.”

She heard a few indistinct murmurs of agreement. 

Her father continued, still pacing the room as he spoke, she imagined whomever was with him was sitting down.

“Ministry hacks all over my house, had to ensure the elves had shut off the upstairs. I wouldn’t want them prying.”

“Not all here is legitimate, is it?” came a characteristically deep reply.

Aurora recognised that voice at once; it was Kingsley Shacklebolt’s. Clearly he had come in with Moody as well. 

“Nope, " her father continued on bitterly. “Besides, a few of the Ministry muppets here are only around for appearance, and I am permitting them for that reason. I can’t be seen as too questioning or rebellious over recent matters. Have to tolerate and play games with certain people.”

There was a pause in conversation here, a minute or so went by without reply, as if they were all soaking in the topics under discussion.

Desiring to be sure that the break in conversation was a natural pause, she pointed at the ground and whispered “Revelio”.

The very general words gave her focus, the power of the spell was in her thoughts. 

Flitwick had taught her this in Seventh Year, blowing her mind at the ill-necessity of words. He had taught her that if she was able, with great focus, to visualise how the magic worked, then the spell would only have to be tenuous in its link to the idea.  
He had said, in French, "gemstone" during one lesson. From the word, a fountain imagined itself into the class, pride of place on his desk. Only he knew the connection, but it was there. As such, when she used "Revelio", the floorboards became as clear as glass, though only from her side of the floor. Beneath her she could now see the figures of Kingsley Shacklebolt and Mad-Eye Moody, both reclining in thick armchairs, whilst her father stood across from them, out of his seat and leaning against the fireplace. His dark clothes collaging with the rows of books shelved on each wall.

Satsfied with her efforts, she sat cross-legged on the floor and watched through the magical opening. 

It was a risky charm to try out, one easier to detect than the manipulation of the gramophone, but her father didn’t notice, nor did Kinglsey, who turned his attention to a brandy glass in front of him. Mad-Eye however, after fixing his attention for some time on the clutter collected on the imperious mahogany across the room, turned his magical eye up to the ceiling. 

Aurora gasped inwardly in shock, her stomach tightening.

She had no idea if Mad-Eye’s eye could see through walls and ceilings. Especially ones that would appear utterly normal from his side of the pane. If he had spotted her however, he didn’t report it, and went back to taking in the pause in conversation, leaning forward in his seat as Gideon went to speak again.

“Right, well, gentlemen, as it is unlikely the three of us will be in the same room again any time soon, I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss a few matters.”

“Gideon, we are so sorry for your loss,” said Kingsley.

It was a weird sensation, seeing them below, and hearing their voices behind her out of old, expensive bric-a-brac. The unusual experience however, of watching something in front of her and yet hearing it from behind didn't register, her only concern now was what was happening below.

“Thank you, Kingsley, but there is no time for further mourning now. Hell, in the past four weeks I have done more than enough grieving as they have fumbled over returning my son’s body.”

“Covered up evidence more like,” replied Mad-Eye bitterly, cracking his knuckles on the armrest.

“Still suspect a rogue?” asked Kingsley, expressing his words more with his hands than Aurora was used to seeing from him in their two or three fleeting conversations. 

“Perhaps,” responded Gideon, pulling his arm off the fireplace, and instead pacing in front of both their chairs. “But their official excuses of incompetency don’t need scrutiny. People have other things to prioritise than them snatching evidence off of a corpse the Ministry has no wish to investigate. If you want to bury things, literally or metaphorically, now with the grace of terror, people can do so.”

“Not to mention with the Vigilant joining the crowd,” added Mad-Eye.

“The who?” asked Kingsley, confused by this conversational segue.

“The Vigilant, that little vigilante troupe that gave you trouble in Whitechapel,” said Mad-Eye, filling him in. “They have gone and got themselves a name.”

“They’re high-brow thugs and crooks,” explained Gideon, more diplomatically “a motley assortment of waifs and strays led by a few righteous vigilantes.”

“More like opportunistic freaks,” said Mad-Eye, reaching for a swig of previously poured brandy, “but utterly devoted freaks. Turns out they take clan meetings, as it were now too. I broke up that one last week, all of them gathered wearing sack cloth clothes and red-face paint.”

“If only their actions were as equally childish,” said Gideon.

“They were plotting their next moves in a group therapy session when me and Alice Longbottom waded in. The cowards disapparated in seconds unfortunately”

“Really?” interjected Kingsley, “they were different when I encountered them. They were picking off snatchers and petty thieves and beating them bloody."

“So they have clearly become more organised since that rabble from back then,” deduced Gideon, he had now stopped pacing and returned to his own seat, his desk chair away from the fireplace and the armchairs comforting Mad-Eye and Kingsley.

“Yes,” said Mad-Eye. “But I have just had word from Fabian, and from the top. What they’re saying around the campfire is that they have joined forces with other groups wanting some meaning, wanting purpose, looking to inflict their own justice.”

“Sounds ominous,” said Kingsley, blackly. 

“Moody’s right,” replied Gideon. “They are furious, and they don’t discriminate. They attack low-rent criminals, snatchers and they attack thugs that don’t do their punching for them, but now they have upgraded. They now target fantastic creatures, they fought off a werewolf in Cornwall and killed an injured Giant in Wales, not even one that was on You-Know-Who’s side.”

“They also have dabbed their hand at killing Death Eaters,” said Mad-Eye.

“No!” said Kingsley, momentarily leaping out of his seat, incredulous.

“Yep,” Gideon said, “young Auror such as yourself may be out of a job if you’re not careful.”

“Fat chance,” chuckled Mad-Eye, giving the idea short shrift. “They have had no success yet. I am all for constant vigilance but this group is a bunch of infantile kids.”

“Well Alastor, I am not sure we should be so dismissive,” Gideon replied with his eyebrow raised in a pose that Aurora recognised as when he was deep in laborious thought. “It is often people way in over their heads, with no control of their own depravity that do the worst things. Besides I am not sure how old they all are, but if they are kids, then they have some powerful kids in that group mind you. We don’t have any names of the members, and a few had enough power to evade you Mad-Eye. Tragically there is some good magical stock is invested in this.”

A shuffle of discomfort emanated from Mad-Eye, Kingsley adjusted the watch on his wrist, unsure how to respond. 

“The Ministry has put a notice on it,” continued Gideon, breaking through the closure of conversation. “There is to be no reporting of the group, The Vigilant, and no tolerance of any attempts by them to meet each other. The world is confusing enough with Death Eaters and Aurors, snatchers and law enforcers, dark creatures and err…..Hagrid. Whatever arguments I may make about the requirement to bring all of this into the open and not conceal things behind this elusive shadow that makes everyone uncertain, no one will listen. I have a few friends left in the high office and Wizengamot, but if I keep challenging the overall will of the meet, then I will be on my own.”

“Not a place you want to be in,” grumbled Mad-Eye.

“How so?” inquired Kingsley.

He was out of his depth on this conversation. A man who had shot through the ranks to match Moody within half the time, blessed with exceptional leadership skills, was far less experienced in the dystopia of politics.

“Well, in the case of the Vigilant, it is a two sided coin. They aren’t just butchering bad people. They resent the Ministry,” said Gideon, organising the papers on his desk.

“We haven’t picked off Death Eaters quick enough for them,” explained Mad-Eye

“People want justice and certainty, despite whatever feeble lies the Prophet gives. Justice in their own hands. Justice observable to anyone looking in,” added Gideon. 

“And in their justice, it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty, it only matters if you’re accused,” finished Mad-Eye, polishing off the rest of the brandy in his hand. 

“They have begun intimidating Ministry officials, targeting people in the street and camping outside their homes,” explained Gideon. “They want payback for this war, retribution for lost children, lost wealth, and lost dignity. There might come a point when we have to suspect every beggar on the street has his stake in one side of some sort. This fight isn’t just an ideological one over good and evil, it is one over old grievances and wizarding identity. A Ministry that gives trials to murderers, doesn’t arrest thieves and snatchers, and accepts bribes off wealthy patricians is a target for people who have a right to feel burned by the world. As much as I disapprove of their behaviour of course, I feel responsible for them too.”

“Crouch has remained quiet on them, I should add, think he is involved?” asked Mad-Eye.

“No,” said Gideon after a deliberate pause. “His positions are abhorrent to me, but I can’t see a pure-blooded man of shoe-leather get his hands dirty with street tramps and glory seeking young pretenders.”

“You never know, I think he will do anything for high office,” noted Mad-Eye.

“If you think that, you should see his son,” said Kingsley, a slight creep of humour tickling the tone of his voice. “So restrained I think someone stuck an entire oak tree up his backside.”

With a chuckle, though of a more fatalist variety than Kingsley’s, Gideon said, “Incidentally, when it comes to the Vigilant, I am only being somewhat insincere, when I think that I will be a target next. Probably not top of the list, when it comes to ministers messing up their possibilities for direct action, but I am nowhere near the bottom. It is another reason I have kept my footsteps so light.”

“Compared to the Death Eaters, these peppy kids shouldn’t bother of you," repeated Mad-Eye.

“As I said,” Gideon’s voice took the tone of someone wanting to wrap this part of the conversation up, “it is more likely charismatic, upper class wizards, cheering on a manipulated, vengeful crowd of violent buffoons. Whatever the case, their existence is tragic nonetheless.

“Dumbledore still has your back,” said Mad-Eye.

“Dumbledore, pah”, Gideon’s slammed his hand against the desk to emphasis his derision at the mention of the name.

From through the floorboards Aurora could see the manner of the conversation change, their faces had all become tenser, and the gramophone picked up the volume of their silence. Nothing burnt like the cold gathered in their differences of opinion that were about to come to the fore. 

As Gideon took off his suit jacket, and ran his hand through his greying hair, Kingsley broke through the tension; hoping directness was the best cause of action.

“I think we should move on from this vendetta group and hear about what we, I imagine, initially came in here to discuss. This clearly wasn’t it, was it Mad-Eye?”

“Come on, Gideon!” said Mad-Eye, leaning forward in his chair. “What’s on your mind?”

“Very well,” said Gideon, trying his best to stay even-headed in a way that reminded Aurora of her own failings to keep herself under control during her funeral speech. “Mad-Eye, what were you and Albus talking about at the funeral?”

“In all honesty,” he said, looking at Kingsley with a little look of bemusement, “the absence of the flowers from the field. Albus can be a right soft-hearted fool at times.”

“Dumbledore knows better than to discuss business at a twenty year old’s funeral,” commented Kinglsey.

“Touché,” said Mad-Eye wryly.

There was an awkward break, a crackle on the gramophone.

Below Gideon sunk back in his seat, unsure whether to take this slight criticism as a joke or blow to his honour. He had become so desperate that he had to do this on the day of mourning for his only son.

“Very well,” he said slowly, “but let me say this. I don’t believe Dumbledore has told me the whole truth about Rupert, and I want you to hear out what I know."

At that point he stood up and pulled back his chair. He went to the door and checked through the keyhole in case anyone had broken through his spells and was listening in. Aurora let out a smirk, stifling it only when Mad-Eye turned his magical eye back up to the ceiling. If Mad-Eye had seen her, he didn't mention it.

Gideon went to the wall behind his desk and pulled back some curtains, revealing a black board pinned with notes, chalked writings, and annotated maps. 

He pointed to some reports spello-taped on the western side of the board.

“Rupert was killed by magic, his body was unmarked, and as the Ministry fumbled around not returning him for four weeks, I used my powers of persuasion to ensure that the autopsy they sent back wasn’t a botched cover up. I know people at St Mungo’s, whom oversaw their findings. I made sure they didn’t lie and say it was an aneurysm or whatever.”

This conversation took the form of a presentation now, Mad-Eye and Kingsley stayed where they were, listening intently. 

“That along with the fact they rifled through his possessions is why his body took so long to get back,” noted Gideon.

“Now,” he continued, pointing at the jottings in the centre of the board, “this is the rest of the evidence I have. I wringed information, it was hard, from the Law enforcement agents who found his body. The Ministry tried to hush it up, but he was found at Liverpool Street station, in the gentlemen’s rest rooms by platform two. It was discovered before any muggle found his corpse, or before the 'policemen' found it. The fact the Law enforcement agents knew so quickly where he was makes me suspicious, but I can’t prove or disprove their involvement. It adds doubts in my mind due to the fact they took his possessions, but I think there is a possibility they may have sold them on for cash, or confiscated them as evidence to a secret case. They also just take things officiously or off-the-books because they can get away with it now. I am actually inclined to believe it means nothing. The Ministry has been infiltrated, with Death Eater spies, but also cynical fools looking to sell a nice coat off a body, or a spy working for a private interest like a circle of pure-blood purists or an investment group of goblins. More corrupting than all is their general incompetency. The most convincing idea is that they wanted to make it as awkward as possible for me to call it murder.”

Pulling out a copy of the Daily Prophet from a draw in his desk he stated, “By making everything difficult, they wished to intimidate me from describing it as a murder and panicking people when they are so desperate to keep control. As I said, their very own order is an unruly hive that I am embarrassed to still be a part of.”

He shook his head as he went back to the board and strode from one side of it to the other.

“I don’t see why they bothered with all that; I was always going to go under the cloak for this matter.”

Taking in Mad-Eye and Kingsley’s continued silence he went on with speech.

“I also think if he had anything profound on him, Dumbledore would have waded in, even if it would be hard to do so without dropping his guard. I say this because I am forced to conclude that my son was working with Dumbledore, and particularly closely too.”

Reaching for a glass of whisky, he then added, “I did search my son’s room, it was hard, and I struggled with the idea. I found his log book, not a diary but more of a personal planner. I have deciphered, from the notes that he had been meeting Dumbledore pretty routinely. Oh, he isn’t mentioned by name, but I know why he had the jottings down of muggle sweets in margins, to get into his office obviously.”

On a roll, he said, “Now, who did it? Who killed him? Well, I know it wasn’t the vicious snatchers that killed his wife. Those muggle haters are in Azkaban for life. Sadly not for that offence – but we got them, and I owe some of that to you Kingsley, so…”

He tipped his glass slightly in Kingsley’s direction before continuing. 

“Anyway, it was the very event that caused him to insist upon joining my resistance to the autocracies of the Ministry and the butchery of You-Know-Who behind closed doors. Since then he has been a thorn in many a Death Eater’s side. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this was no bitter revenge attack by one man on a Ministry worker, or a random mugging gone wrong, he was killed by someone, probably concealed in the toilets all along.” 

There something oddly humorous about this revelation, and it was clear that reaching this conclusion had at least given Gideon Meadows some sense of progress. He pointed at some photos on the blackboard before restarting his observations.

“There is no way he could have walked in on skilled dark wizards by chance at that place, or a snatchers crew. One or multiple wizards did it, and until I know why, I will never find out whom. And I will never know why, I reckon, until I know what Dumbledore was doing with him.”

He then said, “We don’t know whom all the Death Eaters are yet, only about seven could I guarantee out in the open are directly linked to You-Know-Who. The question is whether this was one of the pick offs they have done of revealed resistance fighters, or if he was killed on specific requests of someone at the top?”

This uncertainty clearly frustrated him. “That is something I can’t figure out. Assuming he was meeting Dumbledore regularly, and was a favourite of his, more questions come to the fore. I have no proof they were some sort of special mission together, despite Rupert’s skill, there would be more obvious choices for that sort of thing, but I don’t know, Dumbledore nominates strange choices. Whatever the case, it wasn’t working, or if it did there may have been issues. Because Rupert went out of contact with us for a good few weeks before his death, and even Dumbledore admitted to me, when we argued earlier, that he hadn’t been in contact with him for a few days before it all….happened." 

Aurora looked at her fingers. Her nervous tic of gnawing through her nails had caused her tips to bleed without even realising. His final deliberations were about be made:

“Perhaps, he simply slipped up and a Death Eater tracked him and killed him. More likely is that he and Albus had a plan, You-Know-Who perhaps didn’t like it and did his best to stop it, either directly or not.”

There was a lull in conversation; the gramophone recorded the loud squeak in his chair as he moved back to the psition behind his desk. A move that was almost like a defensive retreat to a fort, ready for the potential onslaught coming his way.

Then pleading as he looked up from his desk, said, “Alastor, Kingsley, if I am right, tell me – because I fear is he is now working with Aurora too, and I can’t let that happen.”

Mad-Eye put his empty brandy down which he had been holding throughout the speech and answered, eyes determinedlyfixed on Aurora's father, “You have to trust Dumbledore on this, Gideon.”

“Trust him?” said Gideon, aghast that his revelation of all his work over the past few months had had no effect on Mad-Eye.

“How can I? He hasn’t told me a thing. He could be covering his tracks. He could have botched this himself. Maybe he even killed him!”

Ignoring the final remark, Kingsley downed the alcohol which he hadn’t touched until now and, keeping his tone level said, “Look, Gideon, it is a good case, but you know you shouldn’t have involved yourself like this in resistance business.”

“Resistance business?” answered Gideon, his voice increasing in volume to a shout. “If that was how you were going to treat me I never would have shown you any of this. I am in the resistance! This was my son!”

“I know, I know,” said Mad-Eye, moving his hands up and down in the air as if trying to put out a pan fire. “Kingsley phrased that badly. What I will say is my suspicions are similar to yours. Truthfully, we both have no idea who did it. Dumbledore has said nothing to us.”

“But we both,” said Kingsley forcefully, “even Moody, recommend you let Dumbledore work this out, and we make a plan when the field is clearer.”

“Haven’t you just heard what I have said!" said Gideon, beaten-down. “He clearly has his fingers in many of the pies here, why trust him on this?”

“When have you found reason not to?” said Kinglsey.

“When my son is dead on the floor!” shouted Gideon, slamming his chair to the ground in a similar way to how he did when Aurora fell out with him at dinner.

He was panting, hyperventilating, his emotions causing him to heave as if ready to burst. Pointing an accusatory finger at Mad-Eye he demanded:

“Do you know what he is up to now?”

“I can’t tell you that,” said Mad-Eye, regretfully. “Anything he told me has to be between me and him.”

“In the same way that resistance business between you and him is not chatted about with us,” remarked Kingsley.

“Funny that, isn’t it?” said Gideon with a pained grin, panting by his desk. “How we all have trust in this one cultish leader, whom refuses to tell us the whole picture?”

“It is for our own protection!” said Kingsley, standing up now as well, locking eyes with Gideon. His usual calmness was dissipating, the war-infected fury revealing itself from behind the mask of level-headed deception. 

“A lot of faith in one old man, don’t you think?” said Gideon. 

“Kingsley, sit down. Dumbledore is not simply ‘one old man’, Gideon,” said Mad-Eye, notably remaining in his seat. “Face, it there is too much emotion in this case for you. You should heed your own words. You are letting appearances slip here. 

“Fine,” shrugged Gideon “if you want to be manipulated and fooled by one person, be my guest. However, don’t expect me to continue in this vain. I mean, he has spent more time obsessing over the disappearance of Caractacus Burke than anything else.”

“Seedy little cockroach, that one,” pointed out Mad-Eye.

“I agree that is unusual,” said Kingsley, “he has been on his train of thought for a while now.”

Kingsley had hoped this colourful recognition of Dumbledore’s odd thinking pattern would change the dynamic of the conversation to more peaceful currents; instead, it catalysed another pocket of frustration that had tempered Gideon’s behaviour over the past couple of days.

“And that is another thing!” he said, his arms were risen in a panic. “Speaking of trains…I hear off of one of Fudge’s colleagues…”

“You know one of Fudge’s friends?” asked Kingsley.

“He doesn’t have friends” said Gideon, “he has wands and yes-men for hire. Anyway, I heard from them that when Aurora lay mauled on the ground, neither of you sent healers to her!"

“Fabian had said….”, started Kingsley.

“Now listen here, Kingsley, Alastor,” demanded Gideon, “no more bollocks from you. My daughter could have been dying for all I know on that train, but due to what, administrative issues, you didn’t save her?”

“Look,” explained Mad-Eye. “We had orders, and even when we dislike them, it made practical sense to escort Greyback off first. I didn’t like indulging him with help in front of her, but Dumbledore saw her healed in the end.”

“For God’s sake, Alastor, shut up about Dumbledore!” screamed Gideon. “You, my supposed friend, left her to bleed on the ground, after spending hours failing to fight off what – dementors? Some wizard you are! Perhaps you were too much of a coward for Greyback.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Kingsley as Gideon said this. 

Then, without even intending to use magic, Mad-Eye obliterated the glass on the coaster beside him into hundreds of fragments.

He did not do it with physical force; instead it was an expression of his rage. His internal feelings were projected into the room in a way similar to witch and wizard children using magic without a wand. Ignoring the mess, he stood up from his chair for the first time. 

“As you have been lecturing us, Gideon,” he said, in a forceful growl through gritted teeth, “and as I will remind you a second time - this is all about appearances. We have to assume our roles, as you know, for the war that we are in. There are plenty of other corpses to fret over. Besides, I couldn’t give away that I had favourites, or that I may have been in league with some splinter resistance group by showing undue niceties to the daughter of a Wizengamot maverick. I couldn't even let them know on the train that I knew her! I have to be a tool for destroying Death Eaters, apolitical, and that, Gideon, is the role I have to perform, whatever my real allegiances may be!"

Mad-Eye then pulled out his wand, and moved towards Gideon as slowly and as determinedly as possible, his footsteps sounding off the floorboards for extra emphasis. He stopped inches from Gideon’s face. He was almost half-a-foot shorter, but his intimidating wounds and overall demeanour made him more threatning than any man Aurora had ever met.

“For the record however, if Kingsley hadn’t been there too, I never would have left her on the train. Now I have heard you out because of your son, and you are right, we have been good friends for two decades. I warn you, though, not to question my honour and integrity again, Gideon.”

As they stood with their faces inches apart, one of them had to blink. Gideon, knowing he had crossed the line, turned away from Mad-Eye with a sigh. He went back to his chair behind his desk. He picked it up off the floor and sat down in a sulk. 

“I just don’t want to lose her too, alright,” he revealed. “She should’ve stayed in China. Her mother was even on board with not saying a word. That blasted Ministry message to the Far East has really turned things over for me.”

“You think they sent it in to bring her back?” asked Kingsley.

“No,” said Gideon, “as comforting as conspiracies may be, it was just the tactless incompetence I am all too familiar with at the Inheritance Office. Besides Dumbledore wanted her back, not that he’d tell me why, but as I said, I am aware he has spoken to her. He even told us to stay away from the hospital wing to avoid suspicion too. Elizabeth found that idea hard to take.”

“Sometimes, the way you speak, Gideon, and it pains me to say it on a day like this, you forget what humans are like,” remarked Kingsley, pausing for effect between syllables, trying to weigh his responses in an effort to evaporate the heat from the conversation. 

“I just didn’t want her coming back,” said Gideon, repeating himself and shaking his head, “China was the best place for her.”

“With the cursed tombs and dragons, I am sure it was a children’s tea party out there!” said Mad-Eye.

“You know what I mean,” he choked angrily, “it was a danger she understands, it wasn’t this.”

“Do you know her at all?” said Mad-Eye, rather surprised by these comments. “She was hardly going to cooperate with your plans to keep all of this under the carpet.”

“She didn’t have to know!” said Gideon, exasperated. A mournful look of pity crossed his face. “She means everything to me, and this is a world she is utterly unfamiliar with.”

“Her younger brother could manage,” asked Kingsley, “but not her? He was barely out of Hogwarts when he was fighting dark wizards. He signed up to take out snatchers, but the Law Enforcement department has been forced to act like glorified Aurors for a while.”

“It is not a question of age, but temperament, she’s too...” said Gideon, searching for the word like a fisherman hooking bait, “…..loose, too much like her mother.”

“I think you do her a disservice;” mused Mad-Eye, “she did take out the most powerful werewolf in the country without a wand. If Dumbledore wanted to talk to her, maybe he isn’t so sure of these problems either.”

“You make my point for me!” he exclaimed. “That fight with Greyback on a muggle-boarded train was the stupidest act she could possibly ever have done. Not only did she have little chance of making it out alive, but she is going to have a price on her head from any snatcher, Death Eater or fat-headed opportunist that ekes out of the woodwork.” 

“Dumbledore thinks we have contained it,” replied Kingsley.

“Oh, Dumbledore thinks...screw that!” shouted Gideon, ruffling his hair irritably with his left hand. “The Ministry talk, people here at my house talk. In a month the Vigilant will be after me, especially if your Auror office continues their routine balls-up. I can deal with that. But I imagine in days, she could have the Lestranges following her up an alleyway, and I am not strong enough to lose her as well!”

At this point he burst into tears, Aurora’s heart fluttered, seeing him incapable to cope with the emotion, despite his usual assertive control, just like she had done earlier. Seeing him pour out his vulnerability affected her more than she could have imagined.

Kingsley and Mad-Eye accepted this breakdown, their faces depicting something Aurora imagined they rarely did, genuine sympathy. They realised it was best to let him finish 

Eventually, he regained his composure, pulling out another whisky from the decanter behind his desk and creating a generous double shot for himself. With his two colleagues still attentive, his face widened as if he had forgotten something before he continued in his broken demeanour. 

“And we haven’t even got onto Dorcas!” complained Gideon, rubbing his face in resignation. “She has always been a quiet one, but charming in the right company. Now I barely know what she is up to. I am left tending to the estranged shell of a wife.”

“You need to talk to her Gideon,” said Mad-Eye, his voice unusually melancholic, “she has been falling away from you for years.”

“I know,” Gideon muttered, “but it’s hard….there is a lot of stuff the children were never told.”

“We’ll stay for a little while Gideon,” said Mad-Eye, trying to encourage his long-time friend with a smile, “and sample those fine cigars of yours by the fireplace. Though if you want our advice, we both agree that the best thing for you is to return to your role and get us all the information we need on the Ministry. Try and fix your relationships with your family. Rory and Elizabeth shouldn’t be adrift from you like they are. Dorcas too.”

“When we all find your son’s killers, they will be brought to justice, you have my word,” added Kinglsey, his voice taking on a determined strength to match the depth of his bass tone.

There was another gap in conversation before Gideon gulped down the whisky shot he had poured for himself earlier. He then leant over the table and said:

“I will see to it myself that they get sentenced to rot in Azkaban, But don’t think you can stop me hunting them down Kingsley.” 

Kingsley looked to the floor uncomfortable but weary from the verbal sparring, “I guess it may be futile. Just don’t do anything foolish, nothing good comes out of us being in opposition to each other.”

“I agree with that,” said Gideon, equivocally, before his voiced came more pained again, “just promise me, that if anything does go wrong, that Rory stays safe.”

He rarely ever called her that.

“I promise,” replied both Mad-Eye and Kingsley this time.

From that point on the conversation drifted into a few words only here or there. Sensing that the gathering was coming to a close, and that her mother had already returned to her side of the house, Aurora left for upstairs too.

The sordid after-funeral gathering was wearing thin on her, her mind festering with an insatiable impatience at the idle pleasantries of the conversation down below. 

She made her way to her room, but paused before going in and went to the dressing room across the corridor instead. 

Her father wouldn’t check on her until morning, and her mother would prefer to be alone, she imagined for a little longer before she tried, probably in vain, to solve the puzzle of her situation. Now though, just after the funeral it was too blue for a long heart-to-heart.

She was moved to hear her father speak so compassionately about her, but also furious that once again he underrated her talents, and felt no possibility of trusting her.

In her view, whatever issues Dumbledore had, his false sainthood being somewhat exposed in strain times of war, Gideon was equally indulgent in the secrets and lies.

Aurora was exhilarated.

She had leads, at last.

She knew exactly where her brother was killed, she knew that it was murder, and as Dumbledore and Gideon had both hinted, Rupert was doing something secretive and special. 

She would have to track down Death Eaters herself if she had to, and find out who did it. 

A pang of guilt crept over her when she thought of Stacey, the woman she had not met from the village since childhood, whom clearly had been lovingly interested to the magical world with marriage to her brother. She had ignored calls to return for his wedding, and accepted reasons not to come to her funeral all too conveniently. 

If she had gone back, then maybe she could have reignited their sibling relationship and understood what Rupert was going through.

It still seemed apparent to her that she was a poor detective, only learning information from whatever Dumbledore said to her, and her luck at seeing her father move away from the proceedings to his office with Kingsley and Mad-Eye. Now though, this didn’t matter for now she had a purpose.

When the feelings were less raw, she would go through Rupert’s room for herself. Despite her father's best efforts, if he wouldn’t let her in on this matter, then she would go through his office too, determined as she was to solve this matter.

But with a window of twelve hours, the evening still not fully formed in the purple vapour of the late afternoon sky, she would make her way to London, and plant the flag firmly in the ground.

As she stripped off her funeral clothes in her dressing room, which was Spartan and furnished only with a full-length mirror, a sink, and a collection of her clothes, she called out to Bodie, the stout but bouncy house elf she could hear shuffling down the corridor. 

Putting on a thick dark coat and checking herself out in the reflection, she motioned for him to enter as knocked on the door. Unlike the two other house elves, Roma and Mardy, he had always had a pretty warm relationship with her. Blessed at being treated like an equal by a powerful witch, he enjoyed a status with her that Roma and Mardy did not. Roma was older and overly officious in her behaviour, devoted to the house and really an instrument of her father. Mardy, meanwhile, was devoted to her mother.

Looking up at her with his pond-green, saucer eyes, he said, “Is there anything you need Rory?"

He said this out of respect; it was the name only her friends used for her. She loathed formalities. 

“Bodie,” she said, taking Dorcas’ wand off of the floor by her pile of funeral clothes, “would you be wonderful enough to return this to Dorcas, tell her I found it left downstairs by the drinks stand?”

“Of course,” beamed Bodie, blinking, and taking it in his grasp whilst miraculously managing to haul her discarded clothes onto a hanger in her wardrobe. 

“You won’t tell anyone will you, but I am off until dawn.”

“If anyone asks, I will say I have no idea. But where are you going to Rory?”

“Ollivanders, first things first, I am getting myself a new wand,” she replied, laughing as she gave her coat a straightening tug. 

She then climbed out of the window, and jumped down two floors before making her way over the gardens boundaries and out of the protected zone.

Taking in the unexpected calm of an evening on a winter marsh for a few moments, she paused before apparating away, into the void.


	8. Curious Choices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora heads to London to obtain a new wand from Ollivander, finding it full of unusual characters.

The door to Ollivander’s opened with the ring of a bell. Originally a fun, tawdry quirk that formed the routine function of notifying Ollivander of a fresh, emerging customer, it now moonlighted almost as a security alarm, putting the shopkeeper on edge whenever it rang.

Rather than witnessing the traditional sliding of the ladder from the deep bowels of the stock room to the front desk, Aurora stepped onto the oak floorboards of a shop marinated in an almost ghostly silence.

Bemused, Aurora checked the door, ensuring the “OPEN” sign was definitely still turned the right away. Before her puzzlement could turn to anxiety however, the weak gas lamps that were dotted across the walls flickered on, and the curtains closed on the vestiges of light that dwindled in the November sky.

Aurora gave the room another glance. It looked the same as before. In fact, it was identical to when she bought her wand here eleven years ago with her previously more resilient mother and glowing father. She even remembered Rupert’s little tantrum. His insistent complaints about how it was unfair (that common word of the childhood lexicon) that he’d have to wait another two years for a wand. It was a point of protest he made by stomping his feet outside the store whilst she tried all the pieces of wonder given to her.

All the characteristics of the store from back then were visible now. The two snug green sofas that served as a waiting room by the entrance, furnished with moth-eaten blankets, remained unmoved. Meanwhile the beige wallpaper and the vast array of erratically coloured flowers in clunking pots clung to the store as outposts to a forgotten age of early twentieth century splendour. She imagined since this particular Ollivander had run the store, the artefacts of his tenure had remained constant, familiar to any perusing shopper off the streets.

She strode over to the desk at the front, attempting to press the bronze bell for service. Though as her hand hovered over the ringing mechanism, she heard footsteps gather speed from behind her. A shadow went across the periphery of her vision, it movement blowing air across the scars on her throat.

Before she could turn, a thin wooden implement jabbed her in the neck. It was kept firmly in place as a wrinkled hand clasped her left wrist and pulled it behind her back, pushed upwards towards her shoulder. Feeling the sudden twinge of pain as her arm was screwed behind her, she staggered a few steps, the assailant holding firm as she struggled.

“Ah” she cried out, wincing from the pain, alarmed but mostly bewildered by this turn of events.

It was an unexpected and bizarrely strong movement, but the attack didn’t feel sinister. A little batty perhaps, especially as the whole matter was permeated by the erratic, wheezing breath of the man (she was sure he was male) who had grabbed her.

After a few seconds of their bodies being contorted together, in an awkward, puppet-esque motion, he said, lips close to her ear, “Who is this? What do you want?”

His educated, mild-mannered rasp was like nostalgia to Aurora. She smiled, teeth glowing through the pain, trying to turn her pained look into one of merriment.

“Ollivander?” she said, in a voice of airy surprise.

She tried to turn to get a look at his face, but he resisted. Nonplussed by his rigid grip, her arm remained rammed up against her back. Still hunched with what she assumed was a wand poking into her neck, there was another delay in conversation, before Ollivander let go of her arm and clasped her hood.

“Who is this?” he called out, his voice being a puzzled blend of inquiry and derision.

Aurora hadn’t realised she had left the top of her coat up, concealing her face aside from the fleeting chestnut strands of her hair that darted off across the side of her forehead as a skewwhiff fringe.

It wasn’t surprising that she looked a little like an opportunistic intruder.

His hands did not recoil from the dampness of the coat fabric. A garment that had fallen victim to the erratic bouts of English rain. He dropped the hood across her shoulders and let out an exuberating gasp.

“Miss Meadows?” he said. “I am terribly sorry for all that.”

He tucked his wand back into his pocket, alleviating the pressure on Aurora’s neck. She gave the point of impact a thorough rub before saying, trying to dismiss that silly episode off the bat, “Yes it is me.”

She tried to give him another reassuring smile, and for the first time in a good while, was able to give Ollivander a proper inspection.

Unlike the shop which remained unhaunted by the world outside the store, Ollivander had aged considerably. Though naturally a part of time, his greying hair had now turned to a proper shock of white and his beard had been shorn off like a sheep facing the hack end of a farmer’s wool harvest.

His normally abrasive facial features, which married so spectacularly with this silver-spooned voice and caustic wit, remained very much in place.

“Oh, crumbs” he said, face darting from the door to Aurora who was now recoiling in laughter at the absurdity of the whole thing, “I wasn’t expecting anyone else today…I thought it would be…”

There was a pause as Aurora’s laughs turned into a heaving breath, trying to stay attentive in the slightly sinister diversion of Ollivander’s recollection.

His inflamed eyes went back to the door, before he said “Oh well, never mind.”

He continued to mutter bitterly to himself, limping slightly as he hopped to the door and bolted it shut at the bottom before jangling some keys and turning at least five locks, flipping the sign to “CLOSED” as he did so.

“Some of these locks work better than actual magic” he said, finding his way back to Aurora, who had begun analysing his hitherto unseen limp.

Noticing the direction of her gaze, he said, “Oh this?” pointing at his gashed leg under thick bandage and concealing trousers. “It was just an accident that’s all…my…err….mistake”.

Getting his wand out once more, he closed the windows with a swish before indulging in a grisly cough. “Are you here for business? When you leave you can head out the back door, I am done for the day. I was expecting...but no matter, no matter,”

“Ollivander,” she said, “I need a new wand."

“What happened to eleven-inches, willow and unicorn-hair?”

She hesitated, unsure how much to say, but eventually deciding it would better to tell the truth than lie and come across as bumbling and careless, “A werewolf snapped it.”

Immediately she regretted saying this, not just because she didn’t want anyone to add up that she had been in a fight with Greyback, but also because of the rabid look that Ollivander then feasted upon her.

“Curious,” he muttered, eyebrows raised, as he went to the counter, the boards creaking under his ponderous steps.

He put the shop bell on a shelf nearby, before turning back to her, waiting for his response in the middle of the room.

“Alright,” he said, his moneyed tones taking their frequent camouflage of irritancy, “last order of the day, let’s see what we have.”

Clicking his fingers he scurried behind the counter and hopped on his ladder. Giving it a firm knock, it sped off out of sight around the corner. His voice then sounded more distant as he shuffled through clunky boxes. He called out to her “You stay there, but take your coat off and hang it up”.

Remembering the gnarled wooden stand by the settees, she draped her coat over a peg. She was aware that the last time she had done that, she was too small to reach the hook and her mother had to hang her pink jacket up instead.

A minute later, after some cursing and the sounds of fumbled products dropping to the floor, he slid back into focus from the ladder with a clutch of wands piled in his arms. Masterly negotiating his way down the ladder with just his legs, he wobbled to the counter and dropped them all in a heap on the surface, the boxes scattering in a manner of organised chaos. Though impressively, none fell to the floor, giving Ollivander a perverse sense of clumsy control.

Despite the unusualness of the scenario, she was certain Ollivander knew exactly what each, indistinguishable matte box contained, and where each wand was on the desk.

“Hmm,” he thought, “you know, things may have changed since last time. Your wand arm is still your left?”

Aurora nodded. 

“Good,” he mused. He then bustled over to her with a tape measure and clipboard that seemed to appear from nowhere, before duly measuring her arm, and jotting down a few findings, all the while humming to himself a tuneless old rhyme.

Even when working with a degree of reluctance, he found a thrill to this aspect of the job. It clearly stimulated his creative juices.

“That will do,” he then said, stuffing the clipboard and tape measure onto a bookshelf across the hall. “Now we will get to these wands, shall we?”

He grabbed the first box on the right, which opened with a hollow “pop”.

“Try this one” he said, taking out a wand, “nine inches, ebony and unicorn tail.”

Aurora gave it a flick. It limped out a spark.

“Grr,” said Ollivander, with a thick slice of ham in each syllable, his demeanour becoming more staged. “Useless! No one has won that fiend’s challenge since it was crafted in 1933! Oh, well, let’s try another.”

He gave out a slight chuckle of glee before thrusting more wands at her. Holly and thestral hair came next, but that was a dud too. Once more, he pointed out the wand was an experimental type. Another that he had been unable to shift since the thirties.

Then they flirted with the more conventional magic sticks. Various blends of dragon-heartstring and unicorn hair (all firing blanks) dictated the next half-hour. Aurora realised that despite the mystique of the store, Ollivander predominantly dabbled in the same few cores.

When pushed on this he said, “Oh, well it’s a tempestuous craft, and these are by the far the most stable of wand cores. You do realise that wands choose the wizards? As I say to everyone who comes in here. Heck, I should put it on the door!”

Sweeping up some of the downed pot plants and broken lanterns, victims of Aurora’s wand waving, he continued, “For the most part, wands reveal a lot about each of us whom obtains one. I try and make harmonious blends, for most people are pretty boring with what suits them. You included I may say. Willow and swishy was great for your charm work, but hardly an enigmatic beast in the world of wand lore!”

They tried another ten or so wands, all to no avail. Ollivander turned to a slightly sweaty and exasperated Aurora, “Looks like you’re a tough one this time. It only took about six when you came here fresh with you Hogwarts letter. I even tried a similar wand to your old one. I suppose you have changed, been off somewhere?”

“Asia,” explained Aurora.

“Oh, that might explain it” he said excitedly, “Maybe you are seen differently, by the wand cores, Miss Meadows. I am curious still why you immediately chose me as your port of call? You could have gone to that dabbler in Hogsmeade? You could even have met Gregorovitch on the way back home?”

“Always good to buy from the best,” Aurora said jovially, aware he was fishing for compliments to massage his craftsmanship.

Bouncing from the remarks, but doing his best not to show it, he went to the counter. All the wands he had laid on the desk had failed their challenge by now, or she had failed them, depending on one’s thinking. Now Ollivander swept them back in his hands and climbed aboard the ladder.

“Knowing what I know now, I will get out some of the other less conventional types”, he said gruffly, groaning under the effort of the ladder on his injured leg.

He came back with a cluster of cases. After the first couple failed, both of walnut variety, Ollivander shuffled to a big object dormant under a white blanket. With a point from his wand, the cover flew off and packed itself neatly into a cupboard around the corner, flying at pace over Aurora’s head. Underneath the cover was a gramophone.

Aurora laughed blackly. After seeing one on the train, using one at home for eavesdropping, and observing this gold-plated beast now, they had become an unorthodox landmark of her return home. They were an illusory metaphor of the vintage reverberation of a time long ago, and musical class.

“If I am dallying here all night”, he said, bereft of his normal furious focus, “I want a beat to listen to.”

Turning his wand like a screw tuning a radio, succulent jazz music diffused across the room, giving proceedings a didactic rhythm.

It was bizarre to Aurora that the tension that first greeted her arrival in the room diluted so swiftly. Aurora hadn’t been scared, but his confused paranoid mutterings suggested sinister issues abound or that he had reached a new stage in the evolution of disinclined hermits. Ollivander however, was now acting very off-guard, no longer focusing on other business he was implying in earlier conversation.

Aurora shrugged it off and enamoured herself with the influx of saxophone groove into the room. Somehow she doubted Ollivander had done this with a customer before.

Then after a few more minutes of jazz, and on the fifth wand from this eclectically chosen assortment, the wand in her hand funnelled beams of light at the wall. As the magic stemmed from the tip, a rushing sensation of unparalleled joy came across Aurora. Though it was only brief, she could not help but to smile again.

She then shot a spell from it that whacked a writing desk, which toppled over face first with a crash. Ollivander took no notice of this, and instead inspected the wand. 

Rubbing it between his sandpaper skinned fingers he turned to her, looking at the wand with an element of awe .“You know what this is?”

“No,” she said, inquisitively.

“A complete contradiction,” he said, firmly.

He flicked her new wand like one might habitually twiddle a fountain pen, and directed a spell at the gramophone. It fell silent, and was accompanied seconds later by the same white blanket, zooming back from its furled position up on high out of the way.

“Ten inches. Maple and dragon heartstring,” he mused, “how curious.”

“Sorry,” inquired Aurora, wiping sweat off of her brow with her sleeve, “but what’s curious?”

“You see, you have a rather confusing concoction here. Maple-wood suggests to me that you were wrong to go home, Miss Meadows”, determined Ollivander, holding the wand at arm’s length and studying it like ancient translation.

Giving it another twirl in his fingers he added, “Maple wood is the wood of natural travellers and explorers. They are not stay-at-home wands. Rather for the most part they much prefer ambition in their witch or wizard; otherwise their magic grows heavy and lacklustre. The ambition, in this case, is often that of a dove flying across an ocean, not a lion commanding its home den. This wand glows with use, and brightens with fresh challenges; it does not do well for anyone dwindling on one issue.”

Aurora involuntarily gulped at this analysis, she was nonplussed. This wand didn’t sound like the perfect fit. After all, she had left adventure, and had come back to set her mind on one issue, her family.

“Hmm,” acknowledged Ollivander. “Yes, because Miss Meadows, I imagine you have left what we may call ‘adventure’ behind. Your focus being now on one thing, even if that makes you careless enough to wander into an empty shop and let an old man pin you at his mercy for several minutes.”

“The one marriaging influence here”, he said, continuing, as Aurora stayed quiet, drinking in his words “is the idea of ambition. The adventure side to you has never left, and is expressed in the wand, but it isn’t at the foreground. The dragon heartstring is conventional, but it expresses power, easy power. Your wand is no longer that beautiful instrument for Charms, Miss Meadows. I think you have a tool for a fight. A weapon of war.”

“You can really read that much into wands?” said Aurora, trying to smirk, but a little too impressed with his observational skill, to pull off the dismissiveness she was aiming for.

“I think that, whatever sort of show you put on for apathy or bravado, you actually have quite a lot of potential, if you have not expressed it already,” he said, deducting the analysis slowly, pausing on each syllable.

She hated it when old semi-strangers saw through her like a window pane. However presumptuous of him it was, she squirmed at his perceptiveness. 

After paying for the wand, and getting a receipt at the counter, Ollivander’s face fell from the unusual jollity that had characterised it.

“Now,” he said, dimming the gas lamps, “I best be off, in fact, we overran, overran far too much. There for nearly an hour.”

An element of panic returned to his voice.

“I am going to pack up,” he said. “You can find your way out through that door.”

He gently pushed her in the direction of an exit behind the counter. As she turned the handle, Ollivander called out to her again.

“And don’t forget your coat,” he bellowed, which at this point landed on her shoulders. Putting it on, she stepped out into the night, hearing the door bolt behind her.

It was no longer raining, but the sapping cold was like an assault on her senses. The rank odour of recent showers on dirty street corners clung to the air. Its unwholesome smell following her footsteps back to the centre of Diagon Alley.

From a commercial perspective, it had changed markedly since she was here last, buying her final supplies for the expedition four years ago. The former vibrancy and grandeur of the stores had faded like the colouring of the weather-beaten window frames. Meanwhile, the market stalls were notable by their absence.

Even though it was near closing hour when she had arrived, the withdrawn nature of the commerce was like nothing she had seen here before.

Some people had still gone, neither brazenly or fearfully, to the stores, with looks of determined resolution in their eyes. For old times’ sake, she had gone for a browse of Flourish and Blotts when she first arrived, and observed this in action. People always came in at least pairs, making her an odd fish in the crowd, and admittedly, a potential target. Strikingly for a store that was synonymous with angry debates and chatter, they bought things without conversation. There was no discussion on books, the coffee shop in the store was now closed behind a veil, and people silently accepted payment, with even “Thank you” and “Goodbye” a stretch for the vendor on shift.

Taking business out of the equation, however, it was seldom a livelier affair. People were using Diagon Alley like a thoroughfare to work, hoping for safety in numbers and not much else.

The street was lined with perhaps a dozen law enforcement officers, or at least, officials bumped up to that level through promotions based on manpower rather than skill.

They had no interest in the alleys beyond, but were there to given appearance of safety, within the confines of a space they felt could be controlled.

Wanting to think through her next few hours, Aurora made her way to the Leaky Cauldron for a drink. It was a slight procrastination from her planned travel to Liverpool Street station, but she needed the break, the echo chamber in which to reflect again.

On the way south down the alleyway, she witnessed a handful of officials taking placards off of a preacher.

Dressed in an all-white robe, the female preacher had developed a little crowd that formed around her position in a semi-circle. Armed with posters, artwork and her dramatic overtones, she had told everyone to repent their crimes against magic, and how they needed to be better to save themselves. It was when she blamed the Ministry itself for their situation that the enforcers waded in, confiscating her tools, warning her for dissolving the peace.

The preacher left in a huff, grabbing a conveniently placed portkey and disappearing a ball of mist. The crowd watching then broke up, chatting heatedly amongst themselves as they did so.

Aurora felt this matter wasn’t over, by any means.

The Ministry wanted to control appearances of peace and perceptions, though they had no real desire to take the fight to actual Death Eaters. There could be protestors, but only in narrow confines. There could be peace, but only where they could guarantee it.

One of the places they couldn’t guarantee it was Knockturn Alley. For curiosity’s sake, knowing familiarity with the area could prove useful; she turned left, knowing it was also a shortcut to the Leaky Cauldron. Another matter was that near the main rear entrance to the Leaky Cauldron, there could well be her father’s friends retiring for a drink, or hanging around. A fight with her father would not be conducive.

She had no interest in entering from Charing Cross either, so she opted for the little know side entrance to the pub. Ignoring some of the exclamations of people around her calling her mad, she ghosted across the arch into Knockturn Alley, using it as a shortcut.

Here the world became a little stranger. She passed a market still in full flow late in the evening. Odd music from instruments she couldn’t discern rung in her ears, and the aroma of a spiced meat loitered over her movements. Aurora brushed past sellers of coloured mice, giant’s feet, and defect charm necklaces that she knew would have been fraudulent when working. She even ignored the impulse to buy some of the more unconventional clothing on offer, which seemed alive in its movements at a nearby shop window.

Midway down the alley way, she darted through passage on the left, a narrow path to the side door of the Leaky Cauldron, with a small courtyard in the middle.

The journey from her was untroubled, with the thoroughfare bereft of sound or person, but well-lit and clean. It was a stark contrast to Knockturn Alley, one that surprised Aurora because it was a popular path for hagglers to take, provided they had the conviction to brave the area. She was even more surprised to see the courtyard, built of plain brick and covered by a sheet metal roof, equally vacant. Though a rather ugly meeting zone, it had always been a popular place to sell wares, with often an unusual bunch being found to converse with. Seemingly the Ministry had closed it off, but then again, they weren’t guarding the entrance, and the alleyway was open.

Besides, there was one stand in the courtyard, a Tupper ware stall that sat in the middle of it.

“Hello Pumpkin”, said a bulky witch, teeth as black as her hair. She stood behind the stall, next to a short, but muscled bald man, his beard orange in colour.

“Sorry,” said Aurora, humoured by their odd presence. “I am not interested in anything,” scanning the rusty kitchen utensils on display.

“I mean you don’t need to take the wares,” cackled the witch, as the man grinned beside her “in fact I’d rather you left them as they are, but your coin isn’t negotiable.”

With a whistle and cackle, she pointed her little finger at Aurora. The bald man leapt over the counter, his orange beard turning blue as he approached her, fists raised.

Amused by the challenge, and high on the feel of her new wand, she went straight for her pocket, preparing for the situation.

Unfortunately, as she did so, she began to feel giddy. The perverse confusion of her impulsiveness and arrogance astounded her. When mixed with the depression and fatal feelings she had over the matters of her brother, which she was determined beyond definition to solve, it caused her to lose concentration. She was distracted by the realisation that she was getting into another pointless fight with low-life crooks.

As she struggled to get her wand out of her pocket, fumbling on its handle, her neck was greeted with a sharp jab.

“Move a muscle,” said a voice, its hoarse tone greeting her with the stench of his clothes and dripping hair that brushed against her ear, “and I will put this piece of wood where the sun doesn’t shine.”

“Damn it,” moaned Aurora, “not twice in one day.”

She was thinking of Ollivander in the shop thrusting a wand at her jugular.

“Does she look like anyone mate?” said the foul smelling aggressor, his voice carrying from behind her ear. He put a grubby hand on Aurora and turned her chin to the side, trying to give the bald man a different angle. 

“Nah,” he said, approaching Aurora and stopping just a foot away, screwing his face up in some effort.

The woman had begun cackling to herself again, “I told you, another stray!” she remarked, chortling.

The bearded man shrugged, “It’s no one that I can tell, I am afraid all we can do is nick her purse. Shame I was looking for some tasty bounty gold.”

“From the Ministry or the Death Eaters?” said Aurora, trying to shirk her face away from the odour of the man behind her.

“None of your bloody business, poppet!” said the bald man, striking her across the face.

It was a hard hit, one that connected with her nose and broke it with a crunch.

On impact, Aurora felt her face drop and legs give way. The unexpectedly beefy arms of the man holding her from behind caught her falling frame. With a grunt, he pulled her body back into a standing position.

“Who did that to your neck by the way?” said the bald man, pointing at the scars and leaning in once more, not perturbed by the state of her nose, “I want to send them flowers.”

Aurora was tired of playing games; she had humoured them for a bit, now it was over.

Blood trickled down her face, knotting and welling into thick slides of red liquid as fresh blood poured over the droplets from first impact. The man’s beard then turned pink, of a romantic hue, clashing shockingly with the bald flesh on his head.

She licked it off her lips, turning her teeth a shade of irrepressible scarlet. Waiting for her head to regain focus, she stood propped up by thug behind as the bald man patted her down, looking for her purse. Before he could find her wand, or any money for that matter, she said, voice now nasal, “Oh, you will pay for that punch, egghead.”

“Really?” he said.

“Uh huh,” she replied, spitting out a puddle of saliva and mucus-inflected blood onto the concrete floor. “Well, to be precise, you’re going in that rubbish bin over there,” nodding at the muddled woman by the stall, who had found all of this highly amusing, “you’re going to sprout antlers,” gesturing to the pink-bearded bald-man in front of her, “and you good sir,” she whispered, to the smelly man whom had tagged her with his wand “are meeting that wall head first.”

Then without a second’s more hesitation, she knocked the straggly haired buffoon behind with a sharp elbow to the ribs. She then pushed him to the ground with her right hand, and he fell on his ankle, twisting it with crack of torn cartilage. Ignoring his shriek of pain, she got up into a standing position, wand out at the ready now, splashing blood from the base of her nose all over the injured man on the floor as she did so.

Changing her focus, she thought the word “Stupefy”. It was aimed at the cackling woman. The spell hit her right in the gut. Her laughter abated instantly.

The witch cannoned off the wall behind, colliding with it from seven feet away. She then slid down, like discarded fruit, into the rubbish skip underneath.

Aurora, though able to talk, couldn’t trust verbal spells with a broken nose and damaged diction.

Swivelling on the spot, blood droplets painting the floor again, she ducked from the retaliatory spell of the bald man. He had bellowed like an agitated boar after seeing the woman fall foul to her curses.

“Impedimenta”, Aurora thought, slowing the spells down of her attackers.

Then, flicking their beams of light away, she said in her mind, “Engorgio”. The pink-bearded man expanded like a space hopper. Swelling to ten feet in size, he suddenly took flight, caught by the air swirling through his body like mythic winds. After a few seconds, he clattered with the shack-like material of the courtyard roof, hitting the ceiling like an errant balloon at a child’s birthday party.

As he swore at her, she thought, “Pertrificus Totalus”, pointing her wand at the airy bulk, paralysing it for the time being. Then she turned back to the battle on the ground.

Her deliberations with the bald bearded-man had distracted her from the straggly haired man, who had regained his composure and was limping towards her, wand outstretched.

“Protego”, she cried, forced to verbally deflect the spell after losing a second advantage.

Thankfully she didn’t say “Protebo” or “Prodego”, just able to get the word precise enough despite her injury. Now that her back wasn’t turned to him, she found it hard to take him seriously, as not only did he have big muscles and shaggy dog locks, but a ridiculous handlebar moustache.

Then before he could respond with another attack, she thought, “Anteoculatia”, feeling more positive about the use of this spell this time.

Within a flash, antlers sprouted from his forehead. Reaching out to touch the protruding bones with his hands, confused by the effects of the spell, he dropped his wand to the ground.

“What are these?” he cried, looking very much like a drunk reveller from a Christmas party, with particularly life-like antlers.

He began to flail his arms in anger, like a caveman cheated out of a rigged trade for mountain goats.

Bemused, Aurora thought, wand pointing at the comical stag-man, “Stupefy”, knocking him out cold. She then kicked his wand, knobbly and of a homemade variety, into a drain nearby.

Happy with her work, she then diffused the floater above her. He fell to the ground with a thud. Injured, beaten, and still paralysed from the charm, he groaned as Aurora took a break. She pulled the vest off of his stupefied colleague and used it like a tissue, wiping the blood off of her face. The sweaty white top had now become deep red in colour. Discarding it on the floor, she remobilised the bearded man in front of her.

He limped into a standing position, his beard was now a frosty white in colour.

“I take it you don’t bother with a wand?” asked Aurora, sounding more adenoidal than authoritative courtesy of her wounds. 

“Nope,” he snarled.

After a pause, he added, “So you can cast a few fancy spells,” challenging her, “well big deal.”

Aurora stowed her wand in her pocket, a little recklessly, “I can fight too.”

“Bring it on then,” he shouted, launching a left hook at her.

His fists were sluggish from the strain of the conflict, and Aurora stepped away from his punch with ease. He didn’t even finish his follow-through. Remorselessly, she hit him hard in the forehead with her ringed right hand, his head colliding with the wall.

With a ringing snap, like that of a lorry crushing an aluminium can, his skull cracked. Blood trickled from his ear as his body flopped to the floor.

“Episkey,” she thought, without even using her wand. Her sorry-looking nose then healed instantly.

Looking at the fallen attackers, her face fell in disappointment.

“Oh crap, I just realised that I got the blue-bearded man and antler boy the wrong way around,” remarked Aurora.

The one whom hit the wall was supposed to have grown antlers, and the antler-man had missed his beating.

“Ah well,” she said to herself, taking a purse of coin off of the Tupper ware stand, “in for a penny in for a pound.”


	9. A New Voice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora enters the Leaky Cauldron and meets a long lost face from the past.

Technically, Aurora had cheated.

Since she had gone to the Far East, both her sapphire necklace and ring had been blessed with a strengthening charm. This protected them from damage and gave them some unexpected heft. Thus, they were surprisingly effective in a fight.

She had placed the enchantments on herself, wanting to keep them as reminders of her mother before she had drifted into the wilderness of her mind and the comfort of port. The original purpose was that the spells would deflect any scrapes and bumps that may come her way in a cursed tomb or mountain rock of any kind.

Now, however, she had used them as a weapon, cracking that man’s skull. That was hardly treasuring them, it was careless. 

A little rueful at her decision-making, she gave the jewel a quick inspection; it remained pristine, utterly untouched in appearance. Thankfully she had not found a way to punch with a necklace, other than perhaps wrapping it around her fingers like a knuckle duster.

What was not pristine however, were her fingers. 

They had bruised badly on impact with the bearded man’s face. The ring had protected her index, but her third and fourth fingers had become, like her nose only minutes before, a casualty of war, blotchy and blue in complexion and hue, swelling in size like a mushroom cloud.

It had taken a few seconds before the pain kicked in.

Perhaps it was delayed by the punishing cold, so cold that their breath had done a merry dance in the air as they’d fought. Whatever the case, it seemed to make the pain worse and when it arrived it was certainly more palpable than she expected.

She howled, falling to the floor writhing in agony. Gasping for breath, she held her arm steady, keeping her cool long enough to shoot a healing spell at her injured hand.

Feeling it shrink back to normal size was an odd sensation, similar to blood draining from a wound. 

It was remarkable to her that she had the time to inspect the ring and necklace in some detail, and to even make a callous quip about the concussed bodies lying motionless around her, before the collateral agony of her hands had even registered.

It must have been the adrenalin that had made her so careless.

What was definitely true was that as much as she despised admitting it sometimes, the fight had been nothing short of a rush for her. As she had stood over the bearded man, she had felt a growing perception of invincibility, not hampered by her continued success in any way. As her conscience re-directed her thoughts to the objectives at hand, she left the courtyard as she had made it, assuming no one would be coming.

She stowed the coin purse away in her pocket, before searching the witch. She realised that she was probably a squib, and wand-less like the bald man with the metamorphosing beard. 

Clearly it had been a noisy altercation. The Ministry, however, seemed to have minimal interest in what was happening around here. The illusion of peace being maintained was imperative, but if people were mugged, or in some cases killed in other parts of London than Diagon Alley, it was seen as a secondary issue, or a clean-up matter rather than a case-solver.

After checking her handiwork from the healing spell, she cracked a smile; glad her ring was still in one piece. It would need a new protection charm soon. The fact that the hygiene-disinclined fumbler had not even noticed the heirloom jewels on her said volumes for both their stupidity and their desperation .

Aurora pondered this reality as she made her way through the other half of the short-cut, as silent as the grave, before reaching the Leaky Cauldron. The presence of that group remained an odd mystery. Judging by the feel of the money bag, which was blessed with a fair portion of galleons, they had done pretty well out of their ruse.

Either that or people really liked dirty, broken Tupper ware.

The Leaky Cauldron stood proudly at the foot of Diagon Alley, though tonight Aurora approached it from the side, where it took on a more dilapidated appearance. The painted walls had a more shambling feel, with a door that snugly fitted into a wonky frame.

Its look had always bothered her, because however much she loved eccentric displays of magic, the hack-handed door was shamefully inferior to any muggle construction. 

Living above Wavelock, Aurora and her brother had been made to understand the muggle universe, and for the most part she respected it. Muggle children had routinely appeared at their house, with the charms lifted for certain periods. In fact, for several years, Aurora and Rupert had even gone to a muggle Primary School. She still remembered some of the teachers. Under an excuse laden with the appropriate amounts of confunding, her mother had taken them out once they had reached Year 5, not wanting to have to deal with conversations about which Secondary School they would go to.

They knew they were magical, and they were of course not allowed to say a word, but it wasn’t a bad exchange as they were able to develop their first friends. Muggle friends, ones that she still had faint memories of and that, truthfully, she preferred to the conceited few wizard boys that had lived nearby.

Amongst those muggle friends was even Stacey, now that she looked back on it. She wondered if Rupert had felt that way about her even then.

Consequently she knew of cars, electricity, television, football and even toasters. They had also developed a mathematical basis of understanding, an awareness of muggle subjects, and a genuine empathy for the lives muggles went through. As Aurora mulled this over, not wishing to sound superior, she thought that magical ignorance may have caused all of this chaos.

A part of her feared the tavern may have been empty, or plagued with an uneasy peace that was one spilt drink from a brawl.

To her surprise however, it was busier than it had ever had been. When she pulled the door back with a welcoming creak, opening at its unusual angle, a man toppled out backwards drunk.

Aurora jumped up in shock, hoping she hadn’t started another fight in a matter of minutes. The bumbling man’s cronies however, watching on, found it all hilarious, even more so after being intoxicated by generous pints of mead.

They had clearly been standing in the doorway, boozy and red-faced, palm sweat staining the glasses in their hands. Seeing him tumble, and her, a pretty girl twenty years their junior call-out in shock, was a double laugh that they all found irresistible.

Their cackles echoed across the threshold.

“Good one love," said the pastiest of the crowd.

“Oi, Henry,” said a voice from out the way, “shut that bloody door before we all ruddy freeze to death won’t ya?”

Regaining some composure and letting the slightly disgraced but laughing fellow get back to his feet, and move back into the bar, the man assumedly called Henry turned to Aurora.

He said to her with a wink and jolly, Norfolk accent, “Sorry, love, mind coming in? Otherwise we’ll all get cold and look the fools.”

Aurora thanked him as he propped open the door for her to enter. What she understood immediately was that they weren’t kidding about it being warm.

The interior of Leaky Cauldron, tiled floors and daub walls throughout, had kept its cosy splendour with patchwork armchairs, long wooden serving tables, and staircases to the fire-tended bedrooms. It also, in her absence, had obtained a near tropical heat, an embrace of hot vaporous air that smothered her like water from a geyser.

Struggling to adjust, she turned to Henry and said, “Can you feel it too?”

“The air?” he said. For a drunken man he spoke surprisingly eloquently. “Yeah, love, I hear old Tom the Barman has gone and got himself a fire stove. It is pretty cantankerous in here as you can see.”

Now the door had shut, his voice was tricky to completely discern over the tsunami of conversations cluttering the tavern, colliding against each other like clashing cymbals picked up by a wayward four year old. However, she got enough from the conversation to understand it was to do with ‘Tom’ the owner of great renown around here, and she nodded in recognition of this.

The central, cavernous room of the bar, which acted like a wonderfully designed echo chamber of all discussions from the banal moans of lost keys, to the scandalous talk of lost wives, was packed to the rafters. Now she could see why a crowd had gathered by the back door, for no other seats were to be found. Nor was standing room going spare. In contrast to the tension outdoors, the Leaky Cauldron felt like a glorious haze of high-vaunted dreams. As her mind wallowed in the intoxicating heat, she guessed that for everyone in here to breathe such brimstone in so comfortably, they must have been dwelling there for a while.

There was an appeal to all this. It was a merry outpost to the best and most communal aspects of wizarding life, felt with a tinge of mead and roasted meat. A protected haven, a timeless establishment that’s mannerisms were unaffected by the war. 

All of it was a surprising reality on the most standard of weeknights to be found.

Everyone coped differently with grief. She was sure, once she was strong enough to reflect on that matter properly, that her brother would want her to be happy. Tonight though, she was just here for a drink before her final stop, Liverpool Street Station. Not a party.

It would make sense she thought, that perhaps everyone here had come from a funeral.

Like hyenas at a lion’s death, all they could do was laugh nihilistically into the abyss.

She approached the bar. The grey-haired, round shouldered Tom was not to be found. The service instead was being done by a pairing of dew-eyed young women that conversed amicably with all queueing customers. Whilst waiting, she heard the strumming of a lyre permeate over the chatter of the pub. The room went dark and, in an impeccably behaved fashion, the building followed suit with silence. A single bare light flickered on to reveal a skilled lyrist, sitting above them all on a balcony, beginning a song of medieval folklore.

The lyrist was an older lady, of silvery hair and slight frame, with an unfortunate burn mark across the back of her hand. Not that it affected her musical ability in any way, as any adverse effects were unseen amongst her delicate strumming.

The tune was familiar to them all.

It detailed a Griffin mauling a young maiden, and a heartbroken man going off to its lair to take it on in a fight to the death. Uncharacteristically, in a story that was stirring yet blackly comical, the man loses. The Griffin takes both the fight and his arms. It is in fact, the maiden, whom, recovered from her wounds, kills the griffin with an arrow to the eye.

To beat convention, this old tale had the twist of female victory, but to stop a sixteenth-century riot, she won through the cowardice of archery, and by lifting her dress frontwards to distract the horny griffin from the feast of a dying warlock on the floor.

It was a silly idea, but told all in good fun, with the stirring chorus that always finished with a rousing last line, “Oh men, we go on!” This was always sung by the entire bar each time, in the spirit of camaraderie. Hundreds of tuneless voices entered the fray, often starting a syllable too early in anticipation.

When the song reached its musical embers, the lights returned and there was a standing ovation for the artist, who left throwing her feather-tipped hat into the crowd.

Thinking of the cunning maiden, she was tempted to flirt her way to the front of the queue, but felt that was beneath her. Instead, she waited another fifteen minutes, the queue remaining a more formidable beast than any Griffin, before finally obtaining ale in hand.

She ordered a Nottingham Honey Ale, and drank it where she had bought it, the only room she could find to stand. Closing her lips on the glass she embraced its glowing composition, it wallowed at the back of her throat, leisurely sprawling across her taste buds. Buzzing from its impact, she took the rest of it in welcoming sips, with every effort made not to down it in one.

It may have been easier to have gone straight to the station and ignore the chance for a drink, but the day had been so weighing. The intoxicating comfort of the tavern reminded her of home when it used to be vibrant, and frankly made her forget the need to ever leave. Now, she understood why all these people had stayed so long, it was nothing to do with the stove fire.

All that stopped her staying for an entire hour was the interactions that came her way. Not that they were threatening or even unappealing, but each break from her mental, isolated stirrings reminded her of why she was in London in the first place.

It battled against her initial desires to no longer work her way around any objective itinerary. She was here to solve Rupert's murder. Not here to drink. Guilt began to seep in once more, extinguishing the fiery wonder of the ale slipping through her insides. 

Deciding that she couldn't dilly-dally, and that the one drink was compromise enough to her needs and to her brother, she put her glass on the side and planned her exit. In the space of a few minutes, she had turned down two efforts by cheery men, one set in their twenties, the other (rather boldly) in their forties, for her to join them at their table. Over the volume of discourse around them, she explained to them as politely as she could that, as sweet as the offers were, she had to make a move.

She didn’t want to appear spiteful, so she intended to keep to her word.

What she didn’t feel so comfortable with was the man watching her from a distance.

Short in stature and cursed with a shock of unkempt auburn hair, beaten flat with what looked like a pound of brylcreem, he sat on a table nearby. He had a rolled up cigarette in his hand, and the gentle infusion of tobacco had crept through her nostrils like glacially paced osmosis. 

He kept looking at her, revealing himself through clunky personality tics. His chair would squeak and his fidgety shoulders would stoop in her direction every time she looked away. 

Whoever he was, he was sitting alone, wearing a grey overcoat that was so loose on him that it engulfed his torso, and manipulating him it into a shapeless matter.

Trying to stay calm, she twiddled her thumbs on the glass and waited a couple of minutes. Seeing that his cigarette was no longer lit, dying out from a lack of breath, the stick exposed as no more than a ruse, Aurora was convinced. 

She made her way to the side exit, hoping he would follow suit. Sure enough, as soon as she had gone six paces, she heard his chair, just permeable over the bubbly atmosphere scrape backwards against the floor. Aurora kept going, too determined to feel nervous, and squeezed her body through the mass of people, even recognising the drunkards that had first seen her enter the bar. Accepting cheery goodbyes off of Henry and the rest of his crew, she pushed the exit door open and thrust herself into the bitter greeting of the bleak, mercilessly-cold evening.

Aurora concealed herself with a disillusionment charm, using the spell more times in the last few days than she would even in a month among the tombs. The power of her new wand caused her to shimmer internally at the pronounced effects of the spell. She waited by the exit, her body concealed by the magic. Pestilent bouts of winter wind kissed her face as she did so, and though no one could see her, her ears were turning red. Nonetheless, she continued to wait, expecting the tail to emerge.

Sure enough, the dowdy man came out the pub. It only took him three minutes to catch up. He closed the access door behind him, struggling with its weight and angle. He dawdled there for a moment, before muttering to himself and looking up at the sky. Aurora, scanned the back door, deciding that the revellers inside would be too distracted to hear her.

At that moment, she tapped herself on the waist to end the spell, and pushed him to the ground.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, as he crumpled on the floor, wincing as he grazed his hands in an effort to stop himself falling flat on his face.

Though he began to wheeze, she deflected any notions of sympathy and said, "Tell me, who are you?"

“I can explain, alright,” he grumbled.

“Oh really?” said Aurora, amused, “You can explain why you were following me?”

“I weren’t following,” he said, his voice betraying an East End origin, “I was watching.”

“Then why did you come out here?” she demanded, pulling out her new wand and pointing it at the man, who struggled to regain his composure.

His eyes were mole-like, though watery, and even now she could see his gelled hair was receding.

After a pause he said, “Dumbledore…”

“Dumbledore?” she called out in, her voice tainted with derision. “Bullshit, is this anything to do with Dumbledore!”

“Please,” he said quivering, “listen alright…..”

Aurora gave him no time to finish and grabbed him by the cuffs of his coat, furious at being tailed, by Dumbledore, or whoever it was, after the hell she had been through.

“Listen, little man,” she said, her dark brown eyes fierce with rage, “tell me what you know.”

“Ok,” said the man, gasping for breath, “ok, ok….”

Before he could continue, the wind howled over their words, as it began to cease, a voice broke through the stand-off.

“Mundungus Fletcher,” it said, in a sneering tone, inflected with a tickle of pampered irony.

Aurora turned in the direction of the voice, letting go of Mundungus, who fell to floor once more with a thud. A black coated man was approaching from the alleyway path she had used only half an hour before. 

It took her a moment, the cognitive processes of her mind clanking together like poorly oiled cogs, but she recognised the name. The tail in the pub was Mundungus Fletcher, some sort of wheeler dealer. He had sold the werewolves the black smoke on the train. There was no way that he was working for Dumbledore, was there?

“I wouldn’t worry about him,” said the man, pointing at the panting lump on the ground. “He is utterly inept. The last time he apparated he splinched himself in half getting out of a house he burgled. The Ministry found it all deeply amusing, as did I.”

Aurora studied the new arrival. He propped his sense of entitlement up with his eyebrows alone. They were long, like a bird’s wing, and dark. They expressed his disdain in a manner of true authority. He was six feet in height, and had the demeanour of a slovenly cat. He was utterly relaxed, hands in his pockets, whilst his hair was golden in colour; like a princeling.

His build was slim and wiry, and his soft locks drooped over his shoulder in a style that could only be perceived as manicured. Most telling about him was his long thin face, which was well shaven, harbouring a smile of the utmost satisfaction.

Rubbing his chin, he said, almost melodramatically, “If it isn’t Aurora Meadows: loud, brusque, and genuinely unsubtle. I imagine you were responsible for the mess back there?”

He pointed to the alley, implying the courtyard.

“Who are you?” she asked, uneasy at the use of her name like currency.

“No one of consequence to a blood traitor family like your own,” he said, amused, and analysing her from head to toe. Rubbing his dragon-skin gloved hands together in the cold, he continued in his satisfied vain.

“Oh you look disappointing, hardly as impressive as my friend told me. There is no way you did it! I was in the same year as your brother however,” he purred. “You were always painfully unobservant, so I am hardly surprised you don’t recognise me. As for your Rupert, couldn’t have happened to a better man.”

“Well,” said Aurora, sarcastically, “you were clearly too much of a big fish for me at school. I didn’t hang out with the cool kids that much.”

He tucked his hands snugly back into the pockets of his silver fastened coat, admiring the reflection of his sculpted face from the reflection of shiny shoes. Voice like a whisper he added, “Look around you, dearie, the world is clearly mourning his death”.

He then gestured to the cheers of laughter emanating from the pub.

Aurora shot a stunning spell. She had said it non-verbally, guided out of impulse and turning the wand at lightning speed. 

The man however, deflected it with ease, finding time to let out a thespian sigh before doing so. His wand had seemingly appeared in his hand out of nowhere.

“You can fight me, if you wish,” he complained, “but you will have to kill a lot of people to stay safe. Word just came out, little princess. You are the lucky winner. In a matter of days there will be everyone looking for you.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Aurora, genuinely frightened, by both his skill and the splendorous authority of his words. Her voice was shaking on the last few syllables.

“Oh,” he said, indulgently, “We all know what you did, to get everybody’s attention.”

The blond man was standing there, wand ready. Aurora was aghast, had word of her defeat of Greyback spread already, in only a handful of days? 

It was the only thing she could think he was referring to.

Aurora readied herself for a duel, unsure how else to get out of this. 

At that moment, the back exit to the pub opened. Door pulling to with a winding groan, a ghost stepped outside and joined the fray. Not a literal one, but a person who haunted her memories from time to time, whom she hadn't seen since she was sixteen. It was Laurie, Laurie Knight.

Her face fell in surprise.

A paradoxical cocktail of emotions began to beat through her heart, causing her to shiver and not at the cold. Her feelings were of such an impenetrable blend. They were coarsened by the typical miasma of self-loathing that radiated through her whenever she thought of him.

Not taking notice of his appearance in much detail, unable to observe much through the overpowering sense of confusion, she realised that his face, a little rugged, remained the same. As did his glasses and thick curly brown hair. She wondered if this matter went beyond skin-deep. 

“Lucius,” he called out, his gangly frame marching towards Aurora. His hair still had that lingering scent of olive, from his own home-made concoctions. She admired his kookiness to an endearing degree.

He pulled out his wand, as Aurora remembered it, of holly and unicorn hair. Thirteen inches.

Lucius continued to smirk, as Laurie said, in his Scottish enunciation, “You can stop the baiting. We all know your shenanigans. You don’t know anything; you’re only here so you can duel someone for a promotion off your master.”

“Well,” said Lucius, still crowing. “We’ll see about that. My business is no concern of yours. Though considering your last few months, I wouldn’t be so cavalier.”

Lucius then turned on the spot and apparated away. With a crack behind her, she also saw that Mundungus, forgotten in the diversion, had done the same.

Though, as Aurora noted, “He left behind his ear.”

It was hovering in mid-air still.

Laurie winced, “That looks painful.”

Aurora could only nod in agreement. It was late now, and she still hadn’t been to Liverpool Street Station. Mundungus Fletcher, the man whom had poorly tailed her in the Leaky Cauldron, had mentioned Dumbledore in his mumbled explanation for his actions. This utterly confused her stream of thoughts.

Why would he have involvement? Was it sinister? 

As for Lucius, now that she thought about it, she recognised him from school after all. Because she had made a policy of ignoring Slytherins, it was no surprise that his name didn’t come to her. She knew of their family though, and their loathing of the Nelsons.

Nonetheless, her bubble of invncibilty had been popped, her sheen of self-confidence wrecked by Lucius' words. If he had been hinting about Greyback, she was in serious trouble.

Recognising her concern, Laurie wrapped his arms around her and said, gently, “Hi, Rory”.

She looked up at him, somewhat entranced. Laurie understood this as a cue to keep talking.

“I imagine what you heard must have been pretty frightening, if I have cottoned on to what he said in the way I think you have. But travelling back alone isn’t safe."

She was shaking now, and after wavering for a moment, she burst into tears. She held it in at the funeral, but now with this stress, and the arrival of a man she never thought she’d see again, she buried her head into his chest and sobbed.

The bravado of the last few hours embarrassed her, she wasn’t ready for Death Eaters.

Laurie squeezed her tight and said, “Come on. The safest place is inside. Let’s go and get a drink, and try and sort this all out. I think we need a good talk.”

Then without another word, they went back to the Leaky Cauldron, Aurora’s day taking another turn for the surreal.


	10. Vigilance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora meets an old friend, before taking on a riot in search of a mystical artefact from a land that time forgot.

As they searched for a table, Aurora was creaking and trembling in her movements like a ship caught against an unrelenting tide. She was snivelling somewhat, and Laurie passed her a tissue before placing her in a chair, in the way a store clerk might position a shop mannequin. The emotional trauma of the day had made Aurora’s motor functions almost void for the time being. 

Laurie ignored the sweeping cleaner going by and the two men across the aisle chatting about Puddlemere United. The soft greys of his corneas focused solely on her.

She stayed quiet. He knew she was in deep contemplation, her thoughts lost in the paralysing abyss of her mind. He couldn’t help her, so he waited it out. 

For ten minutes. 

Then for twenty. 

As she turned her hand on the table, revealing the abnormality of her discoloured scar, he squeezed it with his broad palms. She didn't turn his touch away, but she refused to meet his eyes.

Eventually saying, “I’ve been a fool.”

There was a pause, Laurie tried to weigh his response carefully.

Turning his copper-plated watch around on his wrist, trying to keep things casual through the introduction of his personality foibles, Laurie then said, with an element of guardedness, “We all are sometimes.”

She looked at him fleetingly, eyebrows turned downwards as if flinching from his words. 

“Not like me today,” she replied bitterly.

Her voice was huskier than normal, fractured in a way that reflected her overall dissonance with the world outside of her own head. 

The tavern cat wandered past at that point, creating a conversational interlude that added a perverse banality to the tension. It was a tortoise shell with dense ruffled fur and trotted towards them like a satisfied, well pampered prince. As it rubbed its head against her knee, the flicker of a smile passed Aurora’s lips, like a dash from a wave in oscillography, or in the tuning of a radio. After leaving her with a due amount of fur on her clothing, as a memento to its pious decision to nurture her, it scurried up the stairs, perhaps to one of the bedrooms, to indulge in further anthropomorphic favouritism.

Laurie called to one of the cleaning staff. Burly and monosyllabic, he grunted as he brought over two bottles of butterbeer from a nearby barrel, knocking them hard on the table top so that the liquid rose to the neck in a head of foam. 

“Here,” said Laurie, hoping for a reaction.

“It’s been a while since I had one of these,” remarked Aurora.

She gingerly moved her arm towards it, as tentative as a deer pausing before striding across a glen, expecting hunters from the surrounding valleys to fire at her with their shotguns.The taste, sensual but ultimately shallow, warmed her considerably. 

It also reminded her of her school days. 

Fobbing off more opportunities for mawkish, saccharine reflection she let out a slight shudder, clinging onto the supports of reality rather than falling through another trap door of rueful regret.

“You know,” she started, rubbing her face with her nose, still finding it a challenge to keep eye-contact with Laurie, “I was supposed to be out of Ollivander’s by 5pm, and head to Liverpool Street Station by 6pm. Not sure how much of a watch the Ministry takes on magic in muggle places these days, but I was going to seal off the gents with a spell and stay in there until dawn. It is nearly seven-thirty and here I am, stuck in a pub.”

“With some pretty good company to be fair,” laughed Laurie, his gentle Scottish inflection guiding his chuckle.

Aurora said nothing.

“Why,” asked Laurie, scanning her for any clues or hint, “were you off to stake out a toilet?”

Aurora shrugged at him, clutching her warm butterbeer bottle in both hands, “It is a long story.”

She hated this most of all. 

Her behaviours, influenced by her growing inability to consider herself as a human being worth respect, were also a consequence of not wanting to reveal too much to Laurie. It would be too sore for her to enter a trusting dynamic with him again. 

He then asked, “So, you went and got a new wand?”

Aurora nodded.

After taking an imprecise gulp from her butterbeer, she fumbled through the two coats resting on her shoulders, and pulled out the lightly coloured instrument. It clattered across the table as it slid between her fingers. Catching it as it bounced, Laurie grabbed the handle of the wand and turned it a few times, counter-clockwise.

“It’s different to your other wand. That was dark, and narrow, almost rapier like. This one,” he said, wiping of some of the careless finger marks already imparted to the shaft, “is less smooth and cylindrical. It has ridges, and thickens towards the bottom with a pretty pronounced handle. A little shorter, but, stronger – less of a scientific tool, more like one of those muggle guns actually.”

Aurora was impressed, at his observation, and memory of a wand that was now probably discarded alongside it fallacious resting place, Greyback’s drinking glass.

“I wouldn’t worry about Mundungus, may I add.”

“He mentioned Dumbledore,” she said quickly. She felt her insides give out a hollow clang in response; she had already begun dropping the breadcrumb trail.

“Ah,” said Laurie. “Well I wouldn’t read anything into that. Mundungus has been selling dodgy goods to snatchers. I bet he saw you and made the use of the name Dumbledore to sound important. No way is he in league with scumdrops like that fool.”

“Then why was he following me?” asked Aurora.

“Probably wanted your protection,” said Laurie, contemplatively. “He knows all the crooks like him, and used to flog wares outside the headquarters of the Ministry. He probably thought your Dad could help him or something.”

Aurora wasn’t convinced; she turned back to her butterbeer, allowing a pregnant pause to develop. The conversation, the chatter, the structure of verbiage was no more than machinery and artifice compared to the emotional pull of their meeting. 

“Why are you back, Laurie?”

Laurie, for the first time, hesitated. 

“Why are you back, Rory?”

Aurora contemplated his response, before taking back her wand and carefully sliding it into her coat pocket.

“At the time, when you left, you know, it was your choice not mine,” she said, careful not to sound too accusatory in her comment.

“I know,” he said, dithering somewhat with his response.

Laurie was two years older than her, a seventh year when Aurora first properly met him. 

She had been failing Transfiguration.

At sixteen, her intellectual vigour was instead consumed on making spells and smuggling whisky out of Hogsmeade with her friends. Therefore, subjects such as Charms or Ancient Runes that she found naturally easy, were ones she cruised through in a fashion that was anathema to her overeager, tireless brother. She had lazily achieved NEWT level standards in both topics since Third Year. 

Whilst in Transfiguration, she was flirting with a Troll grade through a lack of attentiveness and apathy, a reality that Flitwick, as Head of House, resolved to change. 

Despite her protests, his usual soft demeanour was replaced by that of a strict disciplinarian. He forced her into remedial classes for Potions and History of Magic, even though she was scraping by in those subjects and getting better grades than many others. In Transfiguration, however, her relationship with Professor McGonagall was so poor (particularly after she wrote all her Fourth Year exam answers in Chinese) that the irate Scotswoman refused to help her, telling her to buck up or sink. It wouldn’t have mattered that she has messed up her exam as part of a raucous penalty from a game of Firewhisky Forfeit. The penalty had also required her to moon Apollyon Pringle, the caretaker, on his last day of the job. Nor did it matter that if McGonagall had translated it, Aurora would have for the first and only time, achieved a hundred percent in a Transfiguration test.

So Flitwick introduced her to Laurie Knight, a bookish final year Gryffindor. 

Misanthropic but formidably clever, he took to the task of tutoring her with a hefty degree of reluctance. As his ambitions were in academia at the Luxembourg colleges, he only agreed to do it when he was duly reminded by McGonagall, whom disliked Aurora but had no true wish to see any student fail, that it would look good on his application.

What he expected to get was three hours a week going through rudimentary Transfiguration with an airhead of a girl, repeating the most basic of topics on a circular basis until her monkey logic would finally digest it. Instead he found himself teaching a smart, charismatic, very improvisational and talented witch who understood charms better than anyone in the school apart from Flitwick and Dumbledore. Unlike him, she could do some controlled wandless magic by sixteen, and she wasn’t far off his ability in non-verbal spells. 

Unsurprisingly, when it came to Transfiguration, she was largely ignorant through a lack of attentiveness. Within a few sessions with him, however, she was already up at “Exceeds Expectations” level. Unfortunately the ceiling ended there, and Aurora improved no further, saying that the subject “bored her”, much to his initial consternation. He was hoping he’d uncovered a new genius. What was more peculiar was that Aurora remained a maverick at school, in a loose gathering of four or five girls that sought to rock the boat, and she behaved even worse in Transfiguration lessons as a consequence of all the extra work. She did this largely out of puberty-ridden motivation to spite the teachers who had reported her to Flitwick.

McGonagall blamed Laurie for this, and finding his pride stung, he had dragged Aurora to McGonagall’s office with her out-of-hours worksheets. He established to the Professor, that despite her guff, she was pretty decent at the subject.

He was possibly hoping that he’d received praise for his tutoring, or that she’d warm to the abrasive presence of Aurora from then on. 

McGonagall of course responded by docking twenty points from Ravenclaw and giving Aurora a month of detention, for being deceitful and intentionally disruptive in class. McGonagall could forgive a certain level of honest idiocy, up to a point, but intentional idiocy was another matter.

Laurie had felt a tremendous level of guilt over this, and from then on they met twice a week on their own volition. As Aurora could coast to an “E”, they would spend the sessions talking, establishing to each other that in their own ways they were both outsiders. Furthermore, they weren't their true selves. Aurora was conforming for much of her school career to acting as a rebellious stereotype, and Laurie was pressured into being an isolated snob.

They improved each other. Aurora became more interested in work and valued it more, whilst Laurie became genuinely approachable, sticking to hating Quidditch rather than other students.

The tall, dark, brooding stranger aspect remained however which Aurora, at sixteen, had fallen for in their first meeting.

He remembered when he asked her why she bothered showing up to their lessons, as she had proven she was pass-wrthy, Aurora had said she didn’t like Transfiguration, but that she “liked you though.” 

Within a few months, largely in secret, they entered a relationship of profound intimacy. They shared each other’s thoughts and involved themselves as extensions of each other’s lives and identities. They also tarnished the dignity of half the private closets in Hogwarts. Though when the time came to choose between academia and maintaining a relationship with Aurora, Laurie choose his studies. His true love was the legacy of immortality that a great Transfiguration discovery could bring him.

Devastated by his decision, not even thinking it needed to be one, she went into her NEWTs a changed woman. She wished to bring back an adventure of a fairy tale nature, especially now that she couldn’t have fairy-tale romance. Shunning her old friends too, sifting them from her life over the course of the following two years, she became obsessed with travelling the world, and breaking curses and secrets from the past.

The talks of a dark wizard rising meant nothing to her at that stage.

It was another of Gideon’s complaints. Her father thought she’d travelled thousands of miles away just to avoid a boy.

Laurie stared into the bottle of his butterbeer, unsure where next to take the conversation.

Aurora then said, “My brother is dead.”

Laurie nodded, “I heard.”

Finishing her butterbeer, Aurora took the plunge first, and said “And then after that, I came home. I had to.”

Pausing only when a barmaid came to take away their empty bottles, she looked around the tavern, still groaning and heaving from the excess of people. Reverting to French, hoping it may deflect anyone attempting to eavesdrop, she said, “I have had a horrid week.”

She explained to him about Greyback on the train, about the funeral and what she knew about her brother’s death.

Laurie kept the conversation in French. His abilities with the language were more proficient than hers, though obfuscated by his Highlands drawl.

“What did Dumbledore have to say?” he asked.

“He wanted to talk to me, to understand me I think. It’s clear he knew some of what my brother was up to. He isn’t letting on though,” said Aurora, regret tinging her words.

“It’s obvious he is fighting You-Know-Who, isn’t it? Fighting with The Resistance?” said Laurie, a little deadpan in his response.

“Well,” said Aurora, toning her voice with an element of sophistry, “there clearly is some sort of resistance going on. I am not sure it’s a bona-fide enough concept to be called The Resistance though. More like secret associates that he has gathered together like an expensive sherry collection, trying to play them off against Voldemort’s rabble.”

Laurie winced at the sound of his name. Aurora rolled her eyes.

“Really Laurie, you care about the name?” 

“A little bit.”

“I have been away for four years, I come back and say three syllables and even you cower behind the table.”

Pausing with a smirk, he turned away from Aurora for a moment, perhaps a little embarrassed over the whole matter. 

“Is Dumbledore actually expecting anything from you though?” he then asked. 

“Nope. If anything he is expecting less. He wanted to deflect me from looking for my brother, and he tried to dissuade me from fighting Death Eaters.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Though to be fair, he did leave me with the impression that he wanted to say more, but since then he hasn’t contacted me. He didn’t even speak to me at the funeral earlier today.”

“He is an enigma that one. A funny fellow indeed.”

“I can think of better names for him beginning with ‘f’."

Laurie laughed, loud enough that several heads turned their way. Noticing the tables remained as full as ever, he then lowered his voice again and said, “Maybe he is waiting for this blow over, before inviting you into the fold.”

“It’s possible. He seems to want to me to act like these bar-dwellers. After all, maybe the best thing to do in life is act oblivious.”

“True that,” said Laurie, voice dripping with sarcasm. Catching the attention of a circling barmaid, different in personality for the surly server from before, and ordered another couple of butterbeers. 

As they waited for them to arrive, Aurora sub-consciously began to fiddle with the front of Laurie’s hair. She was surprised it still had the same olive fragrancy from six years before. In fact, she was surprised at how she had slipped back into conversation with him so soon. Her emotional moodswings behaving more like cosmic irregularities than anything else.

It felt like a dream. Not in that it was a heavenly conversation, just that its origins made no sense. Laurie being here was an utter freak anomaly, and only now was she realising the unlikelihood of all this.

Keeping her voice casual, she asked, “By the way, how did you know I was outside?”

“I was in the Leaky Cauldron,” said Laurie, whom had accepted her touch on his fringe without challenge, “and saw you heading out in a hurry. I thought initially you had seen me and stormed off. Then I overheard Lucius from the door, and now we are here.”

“Who were you with?”

“Does it matter?”

Aurora gave a derisive cough, “Were you with a different friend, a new girl maybe?”

“I was here alone,” he said, voice sullen.

“Like me?”

“Not quite. I had just been packing up from finishing a shift here.”

“What? You work here?” Her eyebrows were raised in surprise. “You left Luxembourg for this?”

“It’s not where I expected to be,” he said measuredly. “Though it is how I know about Mundungus. It is also how I overheard ministry hacks chat about Rupert Meadows’ passing.

“What did they say?” she asked, accepting the second butterbeer that was plonked onto the table. Only pausing as the staff member wiped the sticky wooden surface.

“Other than that it was a pity,” replied Laurie, “not much.” 

“Is Lucius a regular too?” she said, picturing him stooping over to serve that odious arrival from earlier.

“Unfortunately,” said Laurie, “I know Lucius largely from giving detentions to him at school.”

It was often said the best of friends could observe long moments of silence together. In this case, however, the lull developed uncomfortably. Surveying the mass crowded around the main bar, she deduced that some of what Rupert said didn’t ring true. He was hiding something.

Turning to him with a steely look in her eyes, the intensity of her corneas locked onto his withdrawn body language, she challenged him, saying, “So what is the real reason you are here, Laurie?

“I just told you,” he said.

“Not today. I mean at the Leaky Cauldron. Your house is near Inverness, you wouldn’t get a job here to just hear gossip. I know when you’re keeping things from me Laurie.”

Her voiced was painted with an element of hurt.

“I do it to pay the bills,” he grumbled. “I live above Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour now. And I am also here for justice.”

Aurora snorted, “That’s a pretty mighty aim for someone who spends half their life reading books.”

“It wasn’t by choice,” he responded bitterly, swilling his butterbeer around in the bottle. 

“A bold notion for you,” said Aurora, unconvinced. “What did Lola think about that?”

“Nothing,” he said. 

After downing his butterbeer, he whispered to her, “My little sister is dead.”

Aurora gasped. Her bottle fell to the floor with a crash, smashing on the tiles.

A few people, clearly enjoying their evening, more than simple sobriety or chatter would allow, stood to applaud mockingly as the same lady who served them came to clear up the mess with her wand.

After apologising, Aurora waited for the tavern to return to the raucous flow that had dictated her stay there. With her voice little more than a shocked murmur, she turned back to Laurie, whose face was morbid and stiff and said, “How?”

He said, “My family upset the wrong people.”

Aurora sat back in her chair as Laurie explained, speaking quicker than before and with his accent more pronounced.

“Dad refused to accept bribes in his role at the Magical Accidents and Catastrophe department. Turned out the bribers were representing Death Eaters, who were looking for a few country blackspots to wreak havoc in. He refused, and when they paid snatchers to beat up Lola on her way home from work, they didn’t appreciate that she sent them back with their tails between their legs. So, from what I gather, at least six Death Eaters raided our house, looking to teach us my family lesson. My parents fought them off but my sister died.” He took a swig from his bottle, before adding sorely, “Killing curse to the neck.”

“No? Who….which…”

“Which Death Eater?” sniffing the air. “I don’t know. I came back to London three months ago as soon as I heard.”

“What about your Mum and Dad?”

“My parents absconded to the States, traumatised. It’s fear. My uncle is a wizard in America, where frankly, You-Know-Who means as much as a sugared-floorboard. They’re hiding.”

“Did they not want you with them?”

“Yes. I was in Luxembourg, like you were in China. But I want justice, not to flee.”

Aurora was lost for words. Her bitterness at how he had left her away, instead she felt only hollow remorse.

“I am so sorry Laurie.”

Laurie turned his bottle to her, as if nonchalantly saluting her. 

“The truth is,” he then said, “when I heard you were back; I hoped to bump into you. You want to find the Death Eater who killed Rupert. I want to find the sick son of a bitch who killed Lola. We can do this together.”

After rubbing his hand against skin of his temple, he cracked his knuckles as if emphasising his determination. 

Aurora asked, “Do you have a plan?”

“I do now.” His eyes lit up and his face creaked into a hooked smile.

“What is it?”

“I wasn’t powerful enough to do this alone, but I think together it might work. We’re going to capture a Death Eater, and find out whom the killers are.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“It isn’t simple, it’s bloody difficult. Worst of all they may be even more secretive than Dumbledore’s ragtag bunch. In which case, they may have no idea who killed Lola. Or Rupert.”

“It’s worth a shot though,” said Aurora, trying to play down the swell of fear as she made note of the idea.

“It is indeed,” replied Laurie.

“Ok, but first off, I am going to Liverpool Street Station tonight. Afterwards we look for a Death Eater.”

“Is that where he died? Rupert?”

Aurora nodded glumly.

Laurie tried to remove the echoing regret in his eyes, saying in a voice more fatalistic and forlorn than even the tones he took to describe his sister’s death, he said, “Thing is Rory, I really don’t think you will get anything from there. The Ministry will have mopped up.”

“Yes,” said Aurora, her voice rising, struggling to keep the conversation in a foreign tongue, “but that’s the Ministry. I know my brother. He was so smart, I understood him. Maybe he was hiding something there?Perhaps he has hidden a code there. Maybe he knew I would come back and he had left communications for me? Or...”

“Maybe got attacked on the sly whilst going for a slash,” countered Laurie.

“If you’re so smart, explain your idea. How are we going to track down a Death Eater?”

“I know people.”

“What do you mean, Laurie?”

“I know people who could help point me in the direction of Death Eaters. Two of us could take one, I know it!”

“And you won’t tell me how, or why?”

“You’re going to have trust me, Rory.”

“Ha,” she said, pointing her finger at him. “Trust you? No, bloody way.”

“Look,” he said, “you’re not going to get out much over the next few weeks. Your father will watch you like a hawk. Search the house for clues after you return from Liverpool Street station and I will write to you as soon as I get a lead. I will find one, I promise.”

Aurora digested his words.

As much as she loathed saying it, he made sense. She wasn’t sure how he could track down a Death Eater, but she would have to take him at his word. If he was telling the truth, and whatever pain he had caused her before he had never lied, this was their best chance. She would find what she could from the station, and then she’d search the house, before waiting until Laurie came back with the information they needed. With revenge served, she could go on to fight all of them, her father be damned.

As she mulled it over, she realised the plan was still very inexact, and she was convinced she was missing something.

Just then, a particularly fat man waded past their table, and comically knocked Laurie’s butterbeer from its coaster. The second to fall in a matter of minutes, Laurie caught it just before it hit the ground.

As the back of his bloomed hips sagged from view, Laurie muttered, “Clumsy berk.”

“Berk…..” said Aurora.

Her eyebrows perked up, her mind began to race. An idea came into her head and her face widened like a cartoon caricature.

“That’s it I’ve got it!” she said, voice reverting back to English.

“Huh?” said Laurie.

“Borgin and Burkes!” 

“What?”

“Berk….” She said it again, rubbing her hands in glee, “Borgin and Burke’s.”

“Come again?”

“Dumbledore…I forgot to say…oh this makes sense now. He showed me an orb. I didn’t get it at the time. I mean, I thought it was one of his batty moments, or some gauntlet I had to pass for his approval.”

She began to laugh, lamenting her sluggishness.

“Ok,” said Laurie slowly, “but why Borgin and Burke’s?”

“Caractacus Burke is missing,” she explained. “Dumbledore has been obsessing over the matter. I heard so off of Mad-Eye and my father. He even said it to me in his office, though he tried to portray it as a casual aside. And then last week, he shows me a weird curiosity - an orb. It was clearly broken off from a set. Where do you find weird curiosities? Borgin and Burke’s!”

“Go on,” said Laurie, slowly understanding the significance of Aurora’s words.

“I think Dumbledore took the orb, wanting what the orb was part of. Maybe it helps defeat Vol- sorry, You-Know-Who,” noticing Laurie wince again.

She then added, “Maybe it was what my brother was looking for. I mean, it still doesn’t make sense. It was an impressively magical artefact, but no great weapon of any sort.”

“What did it do?” he asked.

“It stored dreams. At least that is what I was able to see it could do. Maybe there’s more to it than that.”

“Are you thinking, what I think you are thinking?”

“Well, it is possible that he stole it from the store, or that Burke, wherever he has gone has the rest of it….or”

“It is still there,” concluded Laurie.

Aurora turned to exit, “We should go.”

They could head to the Liverpool Street Station afterwards, though the reason behind Rupert’s death and Dumbledore’s behaviour might all be explainable yards down the road.

Laurie then said, “Alright. I hope this tells you everything you need to know about Rupert, and we find his killer. But afterwards, at least me promise me you will help me find Lola’s still?”

“Of course,” said Aurora.

“There is another problem here too,” observed Laurie, pushing his hair from his eyes.

He pointed at a colourfully coated black wizard entering the bar. 

“It doesn’t matter how crowded it is, that man has the sight of an owl,” said Laurie. “He comes in for a double vodka shot most days, but I know he is checking the place out. I think he meets some of Dumbledore’s friends here too.”

“Who is it?” asked Aurora. 

“Amadeus Shacklebolt. Kingsley’s American cousin.”

“So he knows Kingsley who knows my Dad. Dumbledore said he was trying to bring in international aid. We can’t let him see me here,” said Aurora, her voice becoming slightly panicked.

“That’s ok,” he said, shushing her.

He placed his finger on her lips, “Oh I love it when you get anxious like this.”

Keeping Aurora’s mouth closed with his index, he then winked at her and grabbed the money pouch that Aurora had stolen off the thieves.

“Don’t worry, Rory, I have a plan on that score.”

He strode over to the bar, through the hustle and bustle, ducking below floating glasses and resisting the smells of fresh cooking. Plonking the bag on the counter, he said to the lady behind the till, in a voice honeyed with charm, “Will this pay for four butterbeers?”

The vendor, apple-cheeked but salty in her choice of words, said, “Obviously. Where you been hun? There must be thirty galleons in here.”

She weighed up the bag.

“Well,” continued Laurie, “keep some as a tip, and offer the rest as drinks on the house!”

The woman jumped up in excitement and pulled on a string dangling from above the bar. A bell rang out across the room and the jovialities ceased.

“Listen up people, free drinks on the house,” she cried.

At that point, the clanking of chairs and the dropping of cutlery could be heard, as a stream of people blundered to the bar. Causing a whirlwind of movement that distracted the eye, Laurie turned to Aurora from across the room, stepping onto his tip-toes to catch her gaze as people knocked across his shoulder to reach the drinks stand. 

“Come on,” he said, gesturing to her with a hand.

Aurora and Laurie left the bar, with Laurie saying, delightedly, “Amadeus will be distracted by that for sure.”

They sped away from the Leaky Cauldron heading up towards Knockturn Alley from the conventional, more popular rear entrance, choosing not to return to the courtyard.

It wasn’t unusual that the alleyway was predominantly empty, what was unusual was that there was no Ministry officials guarding the path as there were before.

“This is weird,” said Laurie, his voice turning apprehensive. 

“Wait,” said Aurora, “can you hear that?”

She made a shushing noise, and turned her ear northwards. They could now both hear it.

It was the sound of marching, of drums banging against a hollow drum, whilst the cries of people could just be heard over the approaching din.

“I think we are heading straight for it,” Aurora noted.

“Well, I don’t think we have much choice,” Laurie replied, with dread radiating through each syllable.

They continued up the road, unaware that the beat of drums had become so mesmeric that their footsteps were almost dictated by its beat. They passed Flourish and Blotts, Aeylops Owl Emporium and Madam Malkins as they ran. Every store had its windows pulled firmly shut, others with bars across their entrances. No lights remained on, only the occasional street lamp guided their path.

Within a few minutes they reached the crossroads that lay in the centre of the alleyway. Here their path was blocked by a legion of uniformed men, all wearing jackets of tweed, and unsympathetic faces of grizzled resilience. The closer they came to the obstructing officials meanwhile, the more there nostrils flared with a stench. The distinct smell of smoke inundated the air, filing down the cobbled street and intoxicating their breath.

“Fire?” said Aurora coughing. 

“I know,” replied Laurie.

With an arm over their mouths, to deflect the bouts of wispy smoke, they made their way to a man approaching them. 

“Sorry ma’am,” he said tugging his stiff beard and gesturing to his uniformed colleagues, “the north side of the Alley is closed.”

“What,” she said, “why?”

The official paused, and answered, robotically, “Any business to attend to will have to wait until tomorrow.”

He then moved back into formation, tessellating into the crow, which resembled little more than a stiff, beige mass. The group of them were facing away from her, their backs turned to the closed off side of the alley.

Laurie whispered in her ear, “Look at the crowd.”

Aurora moved a few paces to her left, and saw through the gap in the ranks of steeled men. Obscured from view by the anxiously agitated officials was a protesting mob. 

They wore sack cloth attire, and had smeared red paint across their faces. Their faces were etched with a rage and torment, whilst some carried placards, others beat drums. All of them were calling out to the armed force in front of them, jeering them, demanding justice for lost children and dead relatives, taken by thief and Death Eater alike. 

Their mourning was hysterical, some were crying, others were screaming, waving knives in the general direction of the banked Ministry troops. Meanwhile, they looked on impassive, as a big-chested man, strode to the middle of the war-painted pack and added flames to a huge bonfire, assembled on the street. The small flames trickling from the massive pile erupted, blasting a tempestuous flame into the cool night sky. Their coarse plumes, burning wood, wicker and newspaper, stretched into the blackness, their flames dancing through the atmosphere.

The officials remained unmoved.

This was The Vigilant, Aurora realised. They were the group that had formed from the broken masses of scorned wizardkind. In their ranks were the families of deceased children, people whom had lost livelihoods, and people who wanted to find some semblance in a world that the authorities they had put their trust in allowed to descend into moral oblivion.

What she also saw was that the inaction of the ministerial band was not through discipline, but genuine fear. Not only could she tell this from their hesitancy to retaliate, but also because one close to her had urine trickling down his leg. The acid dribbling into the cracks of the stone bricks.

“What do we do?” asked Aurora. 

“There is no way, we’re getting through there” said Laurie.

“Have you tried apparating?” she inquired.

“Yes, it didn’t work for me. What about you?”

Aurora shut her eyes and thought of Knockturn Alley. It was no good, she remained unmoved.

“It must be some sort of anti-Apparition jinx, put on the alleyways,” Aurora observed, surprised by how far the Ministry had shown themselves as prepared to go. 

“We only have one choice,” said Laurie, “we have to break up the stand-still.”

He pulled out his wand, pointing it into the sky as if about to fire off a flare.

“No!” she shouted, “No way.”

Her voice was now barely intelligible over the heavy beat of their drums, which had raised the pace of their rhythms.

“Well, what’s your idea hotshot?” he argued.

“If you do that, a full riot will break out and I will hold you responsible.”

“Do you want to understand what Dumbledore is doing or not Rory? Do you care about your brother’s death? These are the decisions you have to make!” He was screaming at her, her face was hit with his saliva and spittle.

She looked up at him with scorn, the dark intensity of her corneas holding his gaze.

The glare was enough to humble him. 

Before he could respond, the drums stopped, and the crowd resorted to catcalls and jeering, mocking the officials and accusing them of cowardice. 

As they continued not to take the bate, and the taste of flame became like ash in Aurora’s mouth, one of the red-faced protestors, this one a woman began prowl in front of the ranks, making shapes with her hand in derision.

Clearly stung by nerves, a trembling official shot a spell into the crowd.

It hit a young woman, her red-face knocked by an equally red light. She collapsed on the floor, stunned.

“You fool!” cried one of the ministry busybodies. 

There was a ghostly silence, an uneased calm swept across the rioting pack.

Then, as one, they charged at the officials howling and screeching as they did so. They fired spells from their wands, and additional knives emerged from their garments. Some put placards in the bonfire flame, taking them out once they had caught the burn, holding them as torches aloft.

It was a caustic metaphor. The hopes of the loved ones whose names they had written were literally burning away, turning to smoke.

“Stun them!” called an official from the centre of the defending bank of men.

Then beams of colour met with those of the protestors, creating a morbidly beautiful borealis that laboured in the sky over their grisly conflict.

Laurie prodded Aurora with his wand. 

She felt her body disappear from view. The sensation had become unusually familiar to her.

Her face, invisible, looked at Laurie quizzically.

“I will hold them off, and come to you as soon as I can" he explained. "You get through the fight and into Borgin and Burkes.”

“Are you crazy?” she cried.

“Go, quickly, get to the store, I will catch you up!”

With that, Aurora waded into the fray.


	11. Ariel's Beaker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Found in the depths of Borgin and Burke's is an artefact that may alter the balance of power in the wizarding world for good.

The conflict was basked in the tumultuous heat of the bonfire. It was a paralysing symphony on the weakness of the human condition.

Across an orange backdrop which resembled little more than a searing ocean of roaring flame, their figures cast pitiless and violent shadows. They were morbid harbingers of a broken magical generation. As a protestor plunged their knife into the shoulder of a stumbling official, their reflection caught the virulent light, capturing this moment of conflict as a snapshot of societal torment. It also, perversely, made the grappling seem almost jubilant, as their arms wrestled for supremacy; they were as intimate as any harmonious dance. Were it not for the shining steel, and the raw throated yell of the injured man, they would almost look like two lovers in a sentimental embrace. 

The Ministry’s forces had broken ranks within seconds of The Vigilant’s enraged charge. Their first spells had deflected the aggressive curses of the red-painted warriors, though after that, their discipline had crumbled. The wrought tension of their line snapped like an over-stretched elastic band. They lost shape. Some of them, the braver and more reckless among the crowd, charged at the anarchists, parrying the swinging placards. The were foregoing their wands, struggling with them in a physical conflict. Others fired further spells, leading to a number of the sack-wearing vigilantes to fall to the ground, stunned. Trampled on by the raging inferno of people behind them, their bludgeoned bodies rolled down the camber of the road, damming together in the gutter. The blood of their wounded anatomies merged with the bile and vomit that was being hurled by a struggling Ministry wizard. He was on all-fours, retching and panting, traumatised by the vulnerability of his position but unable to contain his bodily juices as bilious smoke corroded his asthmatic lungs. He was not the only one to shirk from the fray; others stood back, their trepidations palpable on their cowered faces. 

What Aurora realised as she weaved her way through the brutal conflict, was that although the Ministry officials had resiliently beaten off most of the initial aggressors, they were outmatched at least three to one. The scope of the gathered crowd had only been revealed to her once she had penetrated through the defensive positions of the defending forces.

Aurora took the opportunity to stay low, and moved in a crawl as blue sizzling spells crackled from a wand behind her. The blue incantation had blasted three men across the road, with their painted mouths gaped open in surprise. She turned around to see the caster, a man in blood-smeared tweed, tug on his collar, pleased with himself. This was before he was shot straight in the temple by the stinging hex of an approaching anarchist. He crumpled instantly, whilst one of his colleagues bellowed in retaliation and fired curses off in every direction, not discriminating friend from foe. 

The actions of the irate official prompted her into remaining cautious. Though she was invisible to the brawlers in front of her, a spell could still stun her, a weapon could still hurt her, and debris could cling to her body and reveal her fleeing figure. 

Short-sightedness was also a problem with invisibility and as the smoke thickened the closer she came to the bonfire, the more difficult it came to see. Around her she could make out that the Ministry men, now all as angry and as participatory as the rebels they were trying to quash, had taken to ducking for cover. They fired their spells from behind pillars, or indents in the walls of stores. Most of which, though probably vacated, were now furnished with shattered glass, splatters of gore, and structural damage from blasting curses. She could just make out that the upstairs of a nearby house was wobbling; a cavernous gap had been opened up in its roof. 

Also, interestingly, the braying, bloodthirsty jackals that had characterised the initial rampage were thinning from The Vigilant’s pack. Of course, some remained, lunging at men, almost animalistic in their behaviour before being duly knocked out by targeted stunning spells. However, for the most part, only the more powerful and more vulnerable protestors remained. Some of the elderly and younger members of the mob had to conceal themselves, tucked away from the action. They were there to screech their injustices, but less so to fight. Whilst the others were surprisingly adaptive and calculated wizards and witches, and they were more than holding their own against the Ministry. In fact, though their numbers were now roughly even, they were comfortably defeating the officials, firing spells with the help of the bonfire as cover. 

Her father was right. Whoever these people were, they were more than just petty crooks or run-of-the-mill rebellious kids. There was some real magical power in this group. 

When she reached the bonfire, she remained careful not collide with the fighters, crouching to avoid their magic. She had to hit the floor again when a deflected purple curse cannoned off a wall and missing her by only half a foot. The spell ended up marrying with the flame and adding further heat to the blaze. 

The main problem for her was keeping her mouth closed and not inhaling to great a quantity of the fumes, for she was wide-eyed in astonishment at the battle around her. Some of the gravely injured may have been dead, others badly injured. There was no way the Prophet could cover this up and keep its withered integrity. A road that was so familiar to her, a cherished part of her life, was being obliterated. The society she was raised in was not being destroyed here by any Death Eaters; they were taking apart each other.

Her disgust at the matter was interrupted as a jarringly chilly hand caught her ankle. Looking down, trying to shake the fingers off her leg; she saw an elderly lady, blemished in red paint, stare up at her with yellow eyes. Astounded that she could see her, she stayed still and stared back. Then, the old lady began to laugh, and laugh as loudly as any human could conceivably do so. Soon her cackles were audible over the flames and spells only yards away. Her shoulders and chest, flat on the ground, heaved and rocked as her voice strained from the effort. Blood seeped out of the corners of her mouth like a waterfall, collecting in the crook of her neck, drowning her wrinkled skin in volumes of fluid. Then, she gave Aurora a toothless grin before relinquishing her grip on her ankle. She flopped against the wall, dead. 

With her body flat on her stomach, Aurora could now see that the thick wooden implement of a placard had penetrated through the rough fabric of her out-fit, and buried itself between her shoulder blades, probably piercing her heart directly from the back .

Aurora looked over at the monsters fighting further away, and repealed her disgust, having to grab her wrist to stop herself from firing a host of counter spells in an effort to bring it all to a standstill. Truthfully, she knew there was nothing she could do.

After another twenty yards, she was free of the struggle behind her. She made one fleeting look back; Laurie was nowhere to be seen. He must have been in the middle of the conflict, consumed by the intoxicating bedlam, which obscured his body from view. 

Turning any fears about Laurie to one side, she knew that she had to get to Borgin and Burke’s and solve the riddle that had been tormenting her thoughts. The key to what Dumbledore was up to, and where this war was going could potentially be waiting for her in austere antique store. 

Knockturn Alley betrayed a sense of the panicked and recently vacated. The market stalls remained, many with night-time commerce still attached to their sides. The Ministry had clearly waded in and demanded them to clear out. Their illegal wares and dubious products were clearly only a secondary issue. Though a few resolute lights remained on, the alley was soberingly still, with the erratic screams from the fight across the road and the hint of smoke marking the pathways. 

She imagined that by now, the Leaky Cauldron must have been informed and were probably under some form of "protection" (or house arrest in more likelihood) until the chaos had calmed. Either way, she came to the rustic green front of Borgin and Burkes, its letters faded and loose on the banner, only to find its door open ajar. 

The front windows were tinged, yellowed by age, and no items were advertised in its shop front. Instead it looked markedly inactive, with only a door, weighted down by a heavy brass knocker, stretched open across the frame. A billowing gap existed, revealing the gloomy interior of the store. 

Aurora had never been inside Borgin and Burke’s. That was not unusual for most witches. Plenty of people shied from the infamous pawn shop. It attracted only a certain clientele. The sort that were often the consiglieres of dark wizards. Aurora had, however, read Alice and Wonderland. That was on the other hand, unusual for most witches. Having more likely been aficionados of Babbity-Rabity, they would not have understood how to Aurora, the entrance to Borgin and Burke’s looked somewhat like the rabbit’s burrow. From where she stood, six feet from the entrance, there was a dark hole to an oblivion beyond her understanding. She wasn’t sure what she would find in there, and part of her hoped it was all a dream and that she’d wake up in her tent near Zheivang.

She scanned the building a final time, its terraced front revealing no other entrance aside from the ominously open doorway. Aurora looked down at her body, confirming it was still invisible, and then at the alley, confirming it was still empty, before brushing over the threshold, wriggling through the gap in the door. She didn’t want to make contact with it and let the door swing further inward, potentially alerting anyone habiting it of her presence.

Only a slight yellow glow illuminated the store, the flickers of light adding some definition to the dusty wares on display cases, and the trophies collected in a glass cabinet. 

Aurora paid no attention to any of the distractions furnishing the shelves. She ignored the monkey paw, the platinum cuckoo clock; and the shining collection of jewels that lay across a table. Instead, instinct told her to push on to the dark recesses of the shop, to the office at the back lit solely by a bare filament bulb. 

Creeping as carefully as she could, she made her way there without causing any incident. 

The office was a little crammed, and its treasures varied from the grotesque to the invaluable. Jars of frogspawn and beetle eggs decorated a low shelf, whilst a suit of goblin made armour was strewn across his main desk. 

On the workbench adjacent to the door however, was a woollen cloth. The instinct, which had guided her away from the maze of bric-a-brac and sinister wares out front, told her that underneath it was what she was looking for. As gracefully as she could, she approached the table, and pinching the wool, she flicked up the top of the cloth. 

Wrapped in the fabric was a large ornate antique, of a description Aurora had never seen. In her last four years of studying artefacts, she had seldom seen anything comparable. At the centre of the cloth was an imposing, rotund base of solid gold. It was embroidered with patterns and sketches beyond her comprehension, her eyes seemingly unable to discern meaningful shapes from the surface. At the top of the base was a curved lid, and a circle of runes. Connected to the base meanwhile, by golden leaf handles, were three orbs, all of the silvery variety that she had seen in Dumbledore’s office. Also notable was that there was a fourth gold leaf handle, though it led to any empty space, one that should have been filled by an orb.

She tapped one of them with her wand; its hue of silver remained, though now it swirled gently in the glass. It also emanated sound that was notably similar to a piano key.

Aurora leant in to read the runes. They weren’t any sort she had studied in any detail, her focus having been more on hieroglyphs and old variations of Mandarin since she was eighteen. Though at Hogwarts, she had learnt to translate several Ancient British dialects, those were often of a Celtic variety. Whatever language this was, it was unfamiliar to her. 

However, she did notice that it had loan words and plausible similarities to a few Germanic utterances that she had read. After running over the sentence structures in her brain, crouched down by the relic, she gathered that the first word meant ‘devour’. 

Then she went to touch the orbs with her bare hands. 

When the warm flesh of her fingers came within an inch of the orbs’ smooth surfaces, the sound of a piano echoed in her mind once more. With another note of a musical key, the orbs lit up in an ethereal light. A beautiful tint of mesmeric blue, ghostly and mellow, shone from each orb, lighting her face up along with it.

Entranced by the magnificent colour, her mind wandered from the translation. Her senses suddenly felt awakened, a giddy sense of thrill overpowered all her reservations of the past few days. Her eyes closed, overwhelmed by pleasure, seeing only the light. The sweet, joyous light.

Then, the door into Borgin and Burke’s swung fully opened, its handle hitting the wall with a thud. Slamming it shut behind, three sets of leather boots groaned across the floor boards. Their tuneless sonata broken up by the clacking of high heeled shoes from a fourth pair of feet at the back. 

Aurora snapped out of her trance and leapt to her feet.

Hastily chucking the woollen cloth back over the glistening curiosity, she took a step away from the table and stood in the corner of the room, hoping her disillusionment charm remained effective.

“Right this way sir,” said a voice, plummy and hesitant in its iterations.

“By the way, Mr Borgin, this is Narcissa,” came the reply, with a voice that Aurora recognised as Lucius’.

“Ah, wonderful to meet you, ma’am,” replied the second voice, his shoes squeaking as he leant in to kiss her on the hand with an audible smooch.

“Pleasure,” said a female voice that sounded like money.

Aurora hoped they'd continue their little meeting in the midst of the store before heading off once more, unfortunately they had other plans. To her disappointment, they marched into the office. Lucius’ expression was one of disapproval and disdain, his sharp nostrils flinching as browsed the room. To him, the cluttered space looked more like a magpie’s nest than a prestigious vault for precious items. Arriving with him were two colleagues, both dressed in attire as dark and as expensive as Lucius’. There was a lady, whose voice had sounded like money, with white blond hair that streamed down her neck, and a man of a thickset nature with black spiky hair, and a look that suggested both contempt and boredom. He also had severely chewed finger-nails. There was a fourth in attendance too: the shop keeper. This was the permanently hunched, walrus-moustached Mr Borgin, wearing a waistcoat thats buttons strained across his torso.

“Is it here now? I was disappointed to see the store was, ah, unattended to when I arrived earlier,” remarked Lucius, his voice looming for superiority in the conversation.

“I am so sorry about all that, Mr Malfoy sir,” he said, locking the office door behind them.

He pulled out a tissue and emphatically wiped the lens of his glasses. After a few seconds of panted breath, he continued, “I had no choice but to leave when the riot broke out. Some stayed but defying the Ministry would give them every chance to search my store under some order or another. Those bloody yobs caused a right brou-haha out on the streets. Reckon at least two are dead. Going to be hard removing that from the papers! Anyway, naturally I had to delay our business.”

“Naturally indeed,” said Lucius, his voice veering into the theatrical, exposing the overbearing condescension of his tone.

“Yes, apologies, Mr Malfoy,” said Borgin, bowing as he shuffled over to the table, “but no matter, that rabble will soon be sorted out. Must be a dozen aurors cleaning up the mess.”

“Twelve aurors that wouldn’t mind catching me at Knockturn Alley, Mr Borgin,” snarled Lucius, knocking his walking stick hard against the floorboards. “My cover is tenuous enough already, thank you very much.”

“Shh, Lucius,” said Narcissa, in a hushed whisper, her voice hauntingly slow in its delivery, “there is no need for that temper here.”

She caressed his chin, before leaning in to peck him on the cheek. 

Lucius smiled, and after they gently brushed each other’s noses together, their alabaster skin shining under the office light, he leant in for a kiss. They locked mouths momentarily. Narcissa tugged at his lips with her teeth, sighing like a lovesick teenager as she did so.

Mr Borgin looked away, behaving in a way reminiscent to a fidgety father watching a love scene in a cinema whilst sat next to an adolescent son. Rosier kept his attention on the table, meanwhile, utterly unmoved by their display of affection, his stare blank.

Eventually Narcissa turned away from Lucius, and the dreamy complexion of her features hardened into a demanding scowl. 

Her voice deepened as she said, “Now Mr Borgin, if you’d please,” she demanded, gesturing to the cloth on the table. 

“Yes, my lady,” he said. 

After a pronounced bow, he flipped over the woollen cloth and revealed the artefact again. Trying her best not to lean in, Aurora stayed back against the wall, expecting to squint from its ethereal sheen. Instead, it was now listless in colour, comparable to the solitary orb in Dumbledore’s office. 

“It doesn’t seem to be working” said Lucius, scowling at Mr Borgin.

“No,” stuttered Mr Borgin, “of course it wouldn’t work right now.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lucius sharply.

“Ariel’s Beaker,” Mr Borgin said, still rambling somewhat, but enjoying the superiority of his knowledge, “is a rather particular piece.”

He strode towards it and pointed at the central engravings and said, “As you can see here sir, in the middle, look at the runes, it is an Old Saxon relic. What you can also see is that it is supposed to have four orbs flowering from its centre, with leaves of gold attaching those orbs in place. There are only three orbs, and only three stalks. One is missing. It has been cut off from the group.”

He pointed at the upper left quarter, which was completely bare. 

“How come?” said Lucius, eyebrow raised in inquiry.

“Thieves, gravediggers, vagabonds and the like…” mused Mr Borgin. “It is highly probable that the resting place of this artefact was breached at some point. Why only the one orb was taken? I imagine it has something, probably, to do with superstition. I would guess it has been inactive for over a millennia. I can only suppose some superstitious warlock needing the coin looted it and took an orb to the market, but was too fearful of curses and spiritual judgement to steal the whole thing.”

“The Dark Lord wanted it in one piece, he wanted it ready,” said Lucius, cutting through the historical recitations of the shopkeeper. 

“He understands that such complications arise. He is confident of obtaining the rest of it through his own means,” sniffed Mr Borgin.

Lucius snorted derisively. The idea of Voldemort having measured conversation and understanding with a portly pawn vendor was beyond him.

“How did you get it?” asked Narcissa, her face looming in the dull reflection of the grey mist of the orbs. 

“I am afraid, my lady, that is a matter only for the Dark Lord himself,” he said, lowering his glasses. His voice was humbly apologetic, though no one was left unconvinced of how serious he was taking his words.

“Do you at least know what it does?” said Lucius.

“Truthfully, I have absolutely no idea,” replied Mr Borgin, with an uncharacteristic chuckle.

Lucius glowered at him, tapping his fingers on the snake-sculpted tip of his cane.

“Well I have some idea,” admitted Mr Borgin, looking down at his shoes. Baring his teeth into a grin he then said, “But not the full picture, no one does.”

Breaking expected decorum, Lucius said, “And what does the Dark Lord want with it?”

This caused a stir behind him. Demanding answers for Voldemort’s motivation in anything was not treason amongst Death Eaters, but very poor taste. Rosier, who had remained notably impassive and incommunicative throughout this conversation, grunted a sound of disapproval. Even Narcissa turned to Lucius, and said, “Careful my love, let’s not give Mr Borgin here the wrong impression.”

“It’s quite alright, my lady,” he said, licking his lips at the fallout in front of his eyes. "The Dark Lord has always had a great taste in historical trinkets. Many books mention this 'beaker', but aside from a few wildcat theories, nothing concrete exists about its purpose. Its spells and charms are observable, but until all four orbs are in place, I can’t see how we’d discover their specific function. Saxon magic is considerably more layered than our own, most the spells would be only simple on their own, or plainly inefficient.”

After a nervous pause, he then added, tentatively but almost gleeful at the tease, “Though one thing I did read, of interest, was that it is rumoured to light up in the presence of a chosen few. Unfortunately, its reasoning for doing so remains an enigma. It seems that few understood this other than the creator.”

Without another word, Lucius, his face fixed to a determined sneer, strode over to the artefact. Hovering his hands over the central runes and the three remaining orbs, he waited expectantly for the ethereal glow that had blessed Aurora. Rosier, perhaps overly-familiar with Lucius’ sense of false drama, rolled his eyes and looked on derisively. Unlike with Aurora, however, the beaker did not shimmer in his presence. It greeted him, if sentient, with the same dispossessed apathy that it had treated Mr Borgin with. 

Grimacing from the sting to his pride, he then said, “What a load of old nonsense.”

He jabbed it with his wand, and it made a sound identical to that which Aurora had witnessed from the stray orb in Dumbledore’s office. All three orbs, when connected with his wand, 

The grey, silvery mist merely swirled in response. 

“It needs all four orbs to be fully functional, though that shouldn’t have affected whom it glows to. It is a fickle creature, this relic is,” he said, his tones conciliatory.

Lucius looked at the artefact, then at Mr Borgin, before moving to his desk and picking up his pen pot. He took out a quill, and rested the container back on the side.

“I’d be careful Mr Borgin,” he then said. “You may be in the Dark Lord’s favour right now. I even see he got rid of your little Burke problem, by shall we say, getting rid of Burke. Things can turn very quickly however, and if I were you, I’d offer him all the assistance he needs on finding the fourth orb. Otherwise, like this quill here, you will be used, and then discarded.”

He snapped the quill in half, allowing its feathered pieces to flutter to the floor. 

At that point, Mr Borgin’s flabby, dithering face hardened.

“Good night, Mr Malfoy,” he said. 

Aurora had realised at that moment, that Mr Borgin was comfortably the smartest man in the room. Here he was, concealing his cunning behind a shuffling, lumbering caricature. He was more connected and more knowledgeable than anyone in the room, hence why his store of dubious repute had survived so long. He had managed to wind Lucius up to the point that he had snapped. Lucius’ conversations about Voldemort had sounded like no more than whinges off of a scorned ex-lover. 

Borgin and Burkes: It was as much a brand to the world as Ollivander’s. 

Mr Borgin simply gave another curt bow as Rosier went to the desk and wrapped the artefact in the woollen cloth once more. His biceps were large enough to be positively bovine, and yet he carried it gingerly like a diamond on a puffy pillow in a museum. It was enough to make Aurora laugh, though she supressed it by biting her tongue until it bled, which gave her the additional problem of having to suppress a cough. 

Opening the door for the leaving party, after unlocking it with his wand, Mr Borgin gave a nod of appreciation to Lucius, Narcissa and Rosier as they filed out of the room, their prized possession in tow.

Mr Borgin gave the room a glance over, before muttering to himself, “I’ll go and lock the place up in the minute, better check on the stock upstairs.”

With that, he pulled out a key and placed it in a lock midway up the wall. A door emerged, its frame an outline in the wallpaper. He then pushed the wall and stepped onto a stairwell and out of sight. 

She had thought about it trying to take them all on. Hidden by the invisibility charm, she may have done some fair damage. Though if Borgin had concealed skills with a wand half as well as he had obscured his sharp wit, he was no pushover. Nor was Lucius, whom she had briefly sparred with only hours before. Narcissa and Rosier were also clearly Death Eaters too. There was no way, in a cramped office, that she could guarantee defeating all four of them, and getting out alive. Additionally, the artefact could have been destroyed in the chaos. In Aurora’s mind, that may not have been the eventual worst-case-scenario, especially if it would soon be in Voldemort’s poisonous hands. Curiosity though, prevented her from putting it at risk. 

Dumbledore had the fourth orb. She had even held it and examined it. Now, after seeing the rest of this artefact, she probably knew more about Ariel’s Beaker than any person living, despite having never heard of it. That said, she also wondered why it had had glowed solely to her. Was it a sign of approval from the artefact, or something else entirely?

Her chief instinct was to delay the journey to the station, and even the search for Laurie, and promptly flee to Hogwarts to inform Dumbledore of her discovery. Though a more biting, bitter and yet wholly rational part of her mind rejected that notion out of hand. 

Dumbledore hadn’t been clear to her. His behaviour, whatever excuses she could make for the times they lived in, was hardly consistent or understandable. He hadn’t spoken to her since that time in his office. The old man had made promises to her that he hadn’t gone out of his way to show he could keep. He didn’t even trust her in his gang of resisters.

She couldn’t even trust that his ambitions with this beaker were pure. 

Her father’s words earlier that day, of being used by Dumbledore, felt very prevalent right now. 

It also felt strange that she had stumbled across the relic in the most obvious of shops for such a matter. Even if Borgin had only had it on him for a day, it was remiss of Dumbledore not to have noticed it there. The approaching, full-scale war must have rattled his observational prowess, she though. 

Furthermore, her real focus had to be on a more tangible discovery. She needed to understand what had happened to her brother. He might have been involved in the entire beaker business, or could have just been her projection. It was possible it was a solitary mission of Dumbledore’s, a secret he wouldn’t explain, and that Rupert’s death was the consequence of something else entirely. 

As Borgin climbed the last few steps, she crept from her hiding place, ensuring the filament bulb didn’t magnify her outline Moving at snail’s speed, gracing the floorboards as softly as possible, she exited the shop, traipsing away from the various obstacles that she had fallen foul to when entering minutes before.

When she was back in the alley turned to the left, and then to the right, no one was to be seen. The Death Eaters weren’t even shadows on the horizon, they had gone. Impossibly, with a spell deflecting apparition permeating the streets, they had disappeared from sight. Assuming that the Ministry hadn’t bothered with such measures in Knockturn Alley, she closed her eyes and thought of Liverpool Street Station, hoping Laurie had somehow got out of the rabble and was waiting for her. Contrary to her expectations however, she remained rooted to the spot. 

That shouldn’t be, she thought.

“Rory?” said Laurie, his voice appearing from above her. 

Rory swivelled around and looked up. He was climbing down from the roof of Borgin and Burke’s. After grappling a few further window ledges he was down on the ground next to her, his planted feet crashing onto the floor with a thud. 

After a stumble, he took out his wand and pointed in her direction, “Here, allow me.”

“No it’s alright I can do it,” replied Aurora, jabbing herself on the shoulder, removing her invisibility spell with her wand. The sensation of weight and matter returned to her, her footsteps feeling heavier all of a sudden. The feeling was remarkably close to the fatigue factor in alcohol, the sleepy period that depressingly came after seven pints and half an hour of hyper-activity.

“Very well,” he said.

“How could you see me?” asked Aurora.

“Well, in all the excitement, I think we have all forgotten how bloody cold it is - bonfire notwithstanding. Your breath, a source of blown air from five feet above the ground, was a bit of a giveaway,” remarked Laurie.

“Oh,” said Aurora, smirking. “Well where have you been?”

“Well, I got out. It was carnage out there Rory. I got lucky to get away with no one seeing me.”

“How did you do it?”

“Not going to lie to you, Rory. I used a disillusionment charm to get away, though I had to knock out a couple of Ministry officials in the process. Then I came to the roof, in time to see all three of those scumbags leave.”

“Didn’t fancy taking them on?”

“Three Death Eaters, with a clean-up from a deadly riot going on backstage? Hardly the best idea….anyway, it’s good that you’re here at least. I was about to go in and find you, I was scared they may have seen you. Turns out you outwitted them somewhat.” 

“Well, no, not quite,” said Aurora.

She explained the beaker to him, and how Lucius had revealed he was taking the broken relic to Voldemort, for reasons unknown. She did, however, feeling the matter to be intensely personal, decide to not disclose that the artefact had shimmered in her presence. 

“Oh so that was what they were holding,” said Laurie, thinking of the bundle in Rosier’s arms. “Maybe I should have knocked them down after all.”

“You couldn’t have known,” said Aurora, consolingly. “What bothers me more is I have no idea where they went. They could not have escaped from view so quickly, without apparating. I just tried, it still isn’t working.”

“I don’t think,” said Laurie, “that their system of apparition is the same as ours. Being best buddies of You-Know-Who probably comes with a fair number of privileges. Special apparition may be one of them.”

“Hmm….”

Aurora thought about this for a moment, it could well be true, not liking the ramifications of Dark wizards and their unrestricted apparition. She also saw that Laurie, his hair drooping over his eyes, was rubbing his head as if in excited deep thought.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“Ariel’s Beaker,” he said, chuckling, “I can’t believe it exists.”

“You know about it?”

“Yeah, it’s an old object of wizard folklore. The name crops up in the odd scroll or two, and in Bathilda’s first book, that one on grizzled warlocks.”

“What does it say?”

“Not much, but it is referred to a ‘token of great importance’ by one source, and a ‘cursed beauty’ by another. It is also a plot device in plenty of timeworn fictions - a trophy that some gallant adventurer has to retrieve from a beastly cave. Truthfully, no one knows what it does, who made it, and whom Ariel is. I just assumed it was made up.”

“I don’t understand how it is a beaker, by the way. It was four orbs around a gold set-piece. Hard to see how you could get a drink out of that.”

“Well, Rory, things used to have different meanings back in the day, as I imagine you know pretty well. Did you get a look at the runes?”

“Yeah, I had translated one word when they crashed my party, it was “devour”.”

“Sounds ominous that.”

“Perhaps, but I have to say,” said Aurora with a hint of glee, “I am enjoying the return of old artefacts in my life. Reminds me of the good old days.”

“You are tragically young to be saying the good old days,” said Laurie. “Moreover, as you can probably tell from the stench of damp polishing your nostrils, the Ministry have quenched the flames of the bonfire. A team of aurors arrived fifteen minutes ago. They rounded up some of the protestors, others got away with a portkey. I witnessed it myself. Three are dead, and your Daddy’s buddy Mad-Eye is in the group, as is Amadeus fresh from the Cauldron. They will probably search Knockturn Alley once the Ministry green light it, so I suggest we continue our little catch-up in Liverpool Street Station. Wouldn’t you agree?” 

“Fair enough,” said Aurora breezily, trying to sound airily dismissive whilst her stomach lurched from the news of their arrival and the severity of the outbreak of violence on Diagon Alley.

They climbed over a wall nearby, and within a few minutes, they were in Muggle London. Clasping hands, they apparated together to Liverpool Street Station. 

With the time approaching nine o’clock, they arrived on platform two. They were fortunate that a train had just pulled away as they materialised by the rails. Thankful that they found it mercifully empty, they glanced around, noting the arched ceiling and tiled walls. 

“Looks like we’re underground,” noted Aurora, her attention drawn to a dancing squirrel frolicking with a tube of toothpaste on a nearby advertisement.

“I forget how they scurry about under the earth,” teased Laurie.

“The Squirrels?” asked Aurora distractedly.

“No,” said Laurie, exasperated, “the muggles.”

“To be fair, it is no weirder than enchanted fireplaces” said Aurora, pondering over the location of the feted gents’ room. 

“Come on,” she then said, "we’ll have to head up the stairs".

They left the platform and arrived at a forum above, a construction of Victorian heritage. Furiously scrubbed brickwork lined the sides, and painted metal pillars supported a ceiling of greenhouse design. A couple of closed coffee shops featured by the entrance, and a collection of empty benches otherwise furnished the shiny marble floors. For a public station, it was groomed to exceptional cleanliness. 

The station was also small, featuring only four platforms. One and two were on the west side, three and four on the east. Between the third and fourth platforms rested a Ladies’ toilet, and a solitary men's loo was crammed between the first and second platform.

“It is a lot smaller than I thought it’d be” said Aurora. She had imagined a large, generously proportioned restroom like the kind found at Hogwarts, with her brother dying is some sort of gallant, Texas-style shootout. Instead, it looked like Laurie had guessed it right, a knife in the dark.

Undeterred, they scanned for cameras and saw that none were present before waiting a few minutes for the straggling numbers of commuters to head past them for a tube. Then, ensuring no one was there to misconstrue their actions as a public decency offence, they both squirmed into the gentleman’s toilet.

Flicking on the light, they realised the room could be best described as bare. It was a room for one use at a time, with a conventional toilet, a scrub bucket, a sink with no mirror, and the permanent aroma of cleaning detergent. 

“Right,” said Aurora.

She set to work. First off, Aurora scanned the room with her wand, looking for hints or traces of magic. She determined that a vanishing charm had been used on the sink, and through the use of a detection charm, she realised it was used to sweep up blood. Her face dropped moments later when, through the use of a Constance charm, a rarely taught and exceptionally difficult piece of charm work that took her several minutes to perfect, she deciphered the other spells that had been used. As they hadn’t landed on objects, their nature was trickier to determine, but through a wave of her wand, the light turned green, and the room was bathed in an unusual foggy glow. The lines of spells formerly used broke through the mist as traces, completely harmless but striking in their definition. One was a killing curse, a fatal development in Aurora’s mind that confirmed she was in the right place.

Also present was an apparition, a spell technically of sorts that created a gentle imbalance in the fog by the door. This had clearly been used by the murderer to escape. Otherwise the room was untouched. There was a suggestion through various hints that a memory charm had been used on muggles outside, but that was, of course, the legacy of a hasty ministry clean-up job. 

Tried as she did to find them, there were no runes, no secret messages, and no trapped doors to hidden rooms. This place was, and had only ever been, a cheaply constructed toilet. As hard as she wanted to leave open the suggestion that Rupert had left some communication to her, or to anyone, and that in his death he had some sort of plan, she was forced to rule it out. In all likelihood, he had been shot in the back with the killing curse, and crashed his head on the sink, his lifeless anatomy bleeding on the floor. His killer had probably apparated in and out from the same spot, hitting him as he was washing his hands.

Whether he may have carried anything of significance on him in person was highly unlikely, if he had done, Dumbledore would have been more openly involved in this. The reality probably was that Rupert, having fled from Dumbledore and whomever else he was tangled with, was tracked down and killed by a Death Eater. Whatever he was doing with Dumbledore may or may not have involved the orb. The piece that, rather covertly, Dumbledore had taken. His interest was a rival that of Voldemort’s. She still didn’t understand why she would be shown the orb; if after all, he had barely spoken to her since the talk in his office.

Laurie, leaning against the door, remained wordless throughout this. He did not comment as Aurora unveiled the reality of Rupert’s death, and had all her hopes sunk. There, after all, isn’t always meaning in death, and he thought Rupert may well have gone off the rails before being killed tragically.

With another flick of her wand, the fog disappeared and the light returned to normal.

Laurie moved a step closer to her, and they shared a hug. He knew that the discovery of how Rupert died, if not by whom or why, had been a chastening moment for Aurora. 

She looked up at him, her focus on his prominent cheekbones and his eyes that rested below a mind of bilious wit. His attraction was tremendously hard to resist, and she began to lean in, her eyelashes fluttering slightly as she did so. As they came centimetres from each other’s lips, she slowly pulled away, rebuking her emotional malleability.

Aurora took a step back from Laurie, who took her erratic social messages in good grace, and said, “You will write to me won’t you? As soon as you get a lead on the bastards who did this to my brother?”

“Of course,” replied Laurie, “we will do this together.”

Aurora nodded, and then, apparating almost from the very same spot that the assassin had entered the room, she departed home to Wavelock.


	12. Whispers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A haunting dream echoes through Aurora's thoughts, as she makes a stop on the way to tracking down the Death Eater who killed her brother.

Aurora could see him – slumped in his chair, his rotting flesh resting on armrests of carved wood. His fingers, skeletal and gnarled at the tips, were pointed at her. 

“You’ve seen it. Has it sung for you yet? How quaint!” he spat, his voice dripped with envious entitlement. His tones were dulcet, and carried a ringing clarity that echoed across the room. 

“Ah,” he then said, “no need to be so modest, come and join your fellow damned brothers and sisters of fame and repute.”

With a motion of his hands, and a flash of his jewelled signet ring, the great hall built of forest wood faded from view. The walls surrounding her merged into a growing abyss which swallowed the floor beneath her feet. A brief rush of wind swept across her hair, and then she plummeted into the void below. She was descending at an irresistible pace, the nothingness of her surroundings confusing her senses.With a clatter, Aurora found herself sitting opposite him at the table. The only difference being the room had gone and now they were dining in no more than blank matter. Her body felt sluggish, she found it difficult to move from her slouched pose. She looked at her hands, they were bone. No flesh or tissue caressed their brittle complexion. Understanding the revelation, the man let out a satisfied chuckle. His tongue danced across the tips of his teeth, green in hue, standing out in the camouflaged depths of his hood. He then stretched his fingers across the table, and took out a knife. He fondled its ornate yellow handle, inscribed with rose leaves on the blade. Then pointing it downwards, he stabbed at the gaps between his fingers, going back and forth at a quickening pace. For reasons unknown, every time the ebony point embedded into the wood of the table, blood poured from the surface, though it was markedly obvious that he was missing his fingers by clear inches. 

Eventually, however, he miscued and stabbed himself in the hand.

“Not again!” he cried theatrically. He pulled the knife out of the gangrenous tissue, though as it parted from his body, no blood was to be seen. The weapon came out with a thud and he threw it into the darkness behind him.

“Sorry about that. Within the pressing confines of unprecedented time, the mind can begin to wander. Ask my dear Meridia, here if you don’t understand?”

He gestured to a skeleton on his left, also propped up in a chair. The body had decomposed entirely and all that was remaining was a wasted structure of yellowed bone and crumpled rib cage.

“You were so pretty once, whatever happened love? What’s the matter, bit of a chest ache?”

He stifled a laugh before adding the flourishing aside, “I remember you from your best days when the bard was playing and the people dancing. All you need, dear, is more wine.”

He then picked up a glass, and poured its contents down the cracked, shattered leftovers of the skeleton's jaw. Purple liquid seeped from the rim with a hiss and flooded her mutilated remains. Within seconds they dissolved into the surface of the chair. Ignoring the effect of his actions, he said, “I probably should introduce myself to our new guest.”

His head, formerly bowed, rose from the depths of his hood. He tossed it back to reveal his full features for the first time in close to eleven centuries. 

In contrast to the rotting sinew of his limbs, his face was immaculate, carved as if by a dedicated sculptor. The angles of his chin were smooth, and his skin was alabaster in complexion. His hair was groomed to perfection, and though his attire was coarse and rough, it did not degrade his appearance. Curiously, his eyelids remained tightly screwed shut. 

“The name is Barnabus and I’d offer you some of the food, but it isn’t best suited for those of us still…living,” he chortled.

It was then that she realised the glistening gold plates, serving plenty of empty chairs across the long surface, were well served with no cut of meat she had ever seen. On closer inspection, spying the wedding ring on the flesh of a dish to her right, she saw it was a cannibal’s feast. 

“You may think I am a monster, understandable. Though, if I were you I’d look more closely at what sweet Meridia did.”

Then, with a clap of his hands, the nothingness behind Barnabus' chair was coloured by flame and ash. It tickled Aurora's breath. Smoke filled her lungs and caused her to splutter and cough. She looked back at her hands and saw the skin had returned, only to see it painlessly erode away in the red of the fire. 

Projected in the darkness was a child, resting peacefully in a cot. Warm dribble softly crawled down its chin. The chubby infant turned slightly in the bed of straw and soft cloth, stirring only occasionally out of welcoming contentment. Within moments, the door to the child’s room crashed open, revealing the fiery maelstrom the other side of the wall. As a shadowed figure entered, a masculine hand grabbed at its leg and a hoarse voice screamed, “No, that’s our child, your child, what are doing? You foul evil quim, how did you poison her mind like….”

The voice stopped abruptly, as the sound of slashed skin permeated the atmosphere. The figure had cut through the protesting man’s throat. The man rolled away freeing its leg.

Striding over to the cot, the figure came closer into view. The figure was beautiful, female, and as angelic in features as the man at the dinner table. They even shared a resemblance. “Come here sweet, back to mother,” the figure said, cuddling the child, allowing its acquiescent body to cling to her chest. The familiarity of a mother’s touch to a child easing its fears of fiery ruins metres from its bed. 

Then the figure clasped her knife, the very same as the one that the proud man had toyed with moments before, and plunged it deep into the neck of the child. 

As blood gushed from the child’s neck, it fell limply to the floor.

The figure looked down at its butchered body and said, “It is all we ever have beyond the grave. Our guilt.”

Turning its wrist upwards, the figure cut across its own veins, liquid sprayed everywhere, tainting the vision with droplets of blood. 

After that, scene died away from view, and at the table Barnabus opened his eyes for the first time. 

His eyes were a swirling white vortex of light. Their detail was indistinct, and instead a mercurial bacchanal of colour danced in front of his face, obscuring his corneas and pupils from view.

“I can see so much, yet nothing is visible,” he screamed. 

“Not all of us can manage that,” said a voice to the left of Aurora.

Aurora craned her neck round to see a portly woman, dressed impeccably in a nineteenth-century emerald dress. The woman offered her a hand shake. Aurora was unable to accept it, finding it difficult to control any of her movements. The woman replied, “It’s ok, this isn’t your fantasy after all!”

Only then did she notice the woman’s eyes. They were absent. In their place rested a yawning gap into the depths of her skull. Across her middle-aged flesh, cockroaches and beetles emerged from the hollows under her eyelids. Letting a cavalcade of bugs run down her chest, she said, “I would try and find a way to get that fixed; however, I have a bit of an issue.”

The woman then flicked open a bronze pocket-watch, it was adorned with a yellow rose pattern on the front. The dial was spinning, the hands twirling around the face at a speed too sudden for the human eye. There were no numbers visible, no ornate markers to rival the yellow rose inscribed on the front.

“You see, I just can’t seem to find the time for it right now,” the woman said, letting out a ghoulish chuckle. It was high-pitched and eerie in a tone that disassembled his previous composure. 

Then, as if her chair had been resting in quicksand, Aurora sunk into the void with her helpless to resist its pull.

“Oh, going already?” asked the woman. “Well that was rather quicker than expected.”

Unlike before, lingering strains of this visceral nocturnal imagining echoed in the recesses of Aurora’s memory. Her morning was laboured by breadcrumbs, a Grimmsian trail, to the recollections of her vivid nightmare. When she had awoke that morning, part of her thought she had a child. Even though it was an impossible actuality. 

Aurora mulled over the hints and minutiae of her faint remembrances, sure that they meant something but unable to piece it together into anything other than an inconsistent cluster of thoughts.

Fragments had embedded themselves into her consciousness. She remembered something to do with an old ring, a knife and that sickly Dickensian voice that had told her about time. She was unable to suggest anything from this, other than for whatever, it all felt very significant. Dreams were at best unconventional expressions, but the fact this one had manifested itself in her head and stayed there hours after waking up was anathema to anything she had experienced before.

Away from the intensity of those recollections however, Aurora found herself enjoying Theo’s company in a way that she hadn’t done since they had left China.

“I like it you know,” said Theo, inspecting her wand, “couldn’t see you with a maple one, but it looks nice.”

“Thanks,” said Aurora, taking the wand back and tucking it away in her coat pocket. 

“Always brill to have your merry company, whatever the case,” remarked Theo. He poured them both a fourth cup of tea. 

“Well, as I said, it was two birds with one stone really. I also kind of wanted to get out of the house,” teased Aurora playfully.

“That’s me,” Theo buzzed, “the pit-stop. Always the warm-up act before the main show!”

“Oh, yeah, you’re a definite time-filler for sure.”

They broke into hearty laughter, enjoying the self-deprecating consistency of their humour. What was apparent was that Theo, aside from belligerently keeping his cut below the chin as some sort of war-scar, looked in pretty rude health. Not only had he trimmed his hair, and shorn off his handlebar moustache, but he looked relax in a way that made the genial Theo she had knowin in China seem uptight and fidgety by comparison. Wearing a felt dressing gown tied elegantly at his waist, and reclining on his chair like an emperor surveying a conquered kingdom, he possessed a hitherto unseen level of satisfaction. 

“It’s really rather pleasant here,” he said, glancing around his living room. “If it were not so dishonourable to kip before lunch, I’d have taken the train back to slumberville by now.”

The wood burning stove crackled over any deviations and hesitations in their chatter. The thick, sheepskin rug and shelves of books and well-cushioned sofas, meanwhile, gave the room a reassuring ease. Even from their chairs at the table, a hair’s breadth from the cramped kitchen at the rear of the house, their position had no effect on the soft feel of the room, aided by candles that gave off a gentle elderflower aroma. 

Aurora admired the resplendent vibrancy of the room. It defied the blanket of white cloud gathered outside the window, only abstemiously tinged with the suggestion of rain.

Theo was a rather amusing confliction of personalities. 

On the one hand, he was an intrepid reporter, the man she had known, defying the wisdom of creeping mortality to travel the world and suck out stories of interest. Yet he was also a cosy curmudgeon whom on the rare occasion he returned to his thatched cottage in Trowbridge, liked to live the life of confined indulgence.

“Well, Theo, a busy reporter like yourself….all jokes aside, I can’t see you staying here for long, I mean...” said Aurora, struggling to put her question properly into words. It was a sentence that ran away from her towards the end. 

Luckily Theo understood the sentiments she was trying to transcribe into cohesive language. 

“I have no idea what I am going to do next,” said Theo, stifling a yawn, “truthfully I haven’t a clue. Frankly it is a blessing to say that for a change. I haven’t seen my daughter for too long, and even by my standards it was an ambitious trip to Asia. I reckon I will sell my stories to whoever wants them, and then figure it out from there.”

“Uprisings don’t worry you?” said Aurora.

“I have been staving off death for seven decades. Fate will have to try a bit harder if they want me in a coffin.”

Aurora snorted with a mouth full of tea. After a slight splutter, she gulped down the caffeinated residue on her tongue, whilst Theo found a new angle for chatter. 

“So,” he said, changing the subject out, “any plans on what you’re going to do in Hogsmeade?”

“Just a meet up with a few old school friends,” replied Aurora doing her best to avoid her common tic of raising her voice half an octave whenever under pressure.

She was lying to Theo. 

Aurora had received a note from Laurie yesterday; delivered by muggle mail to her personal post vault in the village. It was the same one they had used for letters when she was sixteen. Previously, it had been a key method for talking to him over holidays. This was before she had foolishly revealed to her parents the intimacy that she had with an eighteen year old. An awkward revelation, particularly as in this case, their parents from both sides of the family knew each other via work at the Ministry.

The small cut-out of parchment told her that he had found his lead. He had written it in old ancient British runes, hoping to prevent prying eyes from understanding his message. Laurie gave no explanation over how or why he had found what they wanted. All he had written was that in their search for mutual revenge, he had made a breakthrough. 

Laurie was an exceptional wizard. Her issues, however, of trusting him were natural to any scorned woman. She also couldn’t visualise him in any detective capacity doing all the legwork. Aurora resolved to both follow his lead, but also to question how he had come across it. 

They were to meet that day in the Three Bromsticks at noon. 

Theo was a stop she was making on the way. Guilty at how she had avoided him at the funeral, and also missing his personable, quasi-sophist charm, she had sent a letter asking to pop round for tea. After what had happened on the train, she owed him the conversation, and they basked in each other’s company like lizards radiating on a sun-beaten rock. 

Though she shared with him her wand, and her thoughts on their expeditionary travel, the interplay kept to a frothy base. Theo was good enough to not pry further into that night on the train. His curiosity was obvious, and Aurora had some sympathy for that. After all, he had missed her altercation with Greyback, only seeing her concussed body. To aggravate matters, he had endured the experience of being stuck with fifty hysterical muggles for half the night. 

Unfortunately, detailing what had happened, even if he was owed it, would turn a tap she couldn’t pull back. She respected and trusted Theo to the point that if she spoke about that, she’d speak about Dumbledore, she’d mention the orb, and she’d speak about what she knew about her brother. Undoubtedly, she’d then give away where she was going today, and would probably cap it all off by mentioning the confused remnants of her particularly lucid dreams. Aurora never been much of an occlumens and she was terrible with secrets. 

In order to maintain the confidentiality over what she was planning to do, knowing Theo would disapprove; she determinedly drank her tea and revealed no more details, as terrible as the concealment made her feel. 

“Anything special planned for when you’re there?” Theo inquired.

“I don’t know, it seems like a casual meet up,” replied Aurora.

Theo had picked up the paper.

“Have you seen the Ministry have stopped Floo Powder now?” he asked. 

“Yeah,” said Aurora. “Illegal from this afternoon, I believe.”

“You’re father involved in it, what being at the Wizengamot?

“I suspect so,” replied Aurora, feeling an additional twinge of unease over the matter. 

“Seems a little disproportionate as safety measures go, I am not even sure how it could be enforced. I doubt those bigwigs at the Ministry will be consistent over it,” said Theo flicking through the news nonchalantly.

“I agree,” said Aurora honestly, shrugging her shoulders.

“Hmm...Freya will know about it when she gets back,” he mused. 

Freya, his daughter, had just left. 

She was living with him, caretaking the property on an essentially indefinite basis. 

Theo’s returns to home were a blue moon occurrence. She had kept the property to his liking, but otherwise had free reign over staying there, growing fruits and vegetables in the garden, and adding a feminine touch with pot plants and spalshes of lilac wallpaper. 

Freya had greeted Aurora at the door with a very forward hug and an ear for conversation that was as sharp as cut mustard seeds. She looked to be in her thirties, and had the unusual gift of segueing conversation with such an oiled slickness that Aurora had been completely unaware of how they had gone from talking about socks to the various woes of Freya's ex-husband within three minutes of gathering round the table, teacups in hand. Their relationship appeared to have ended out of stress, a wearing down of their affections as the gears of war grinded forwards. A grim matter of discussion. Nonetheless, she was largely jolly and breezy company. She had possessed a passing resemblance to Theo along with his inquisitiveness, though more subtle in methods. For thirty minutes she had sat with the pair of them and joined in with their discussion. 

Then however, she had promptly left for work, forced as she was to slog away on Saturday afternoons. Being a cog at that extensive employer, the Ministry of Magic, she was on the receiving end of a platitude-serving drive to extend the working hours of the staff in times of civil uncertainty. Her role was in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, a place that she described as jolly good fun, but an aspirational dead end.

Kissing her father on the forehead, and instructing him for the fourth time on how to turn off the magically moving wooden spoons that were keeping his onion soup warm on the kitchen stove, she had apparated off to London a few steps beyond the picket fence of their garden. 

Aurora and Theo had been chatting together like old times for a while since then. 

As Aurora reached for her mug she felt pressure build in her fingers. The tips started to itch, and the feeling of flesh to a flame ruminated from her skin. She recoiled, pulling her hand back from the cup. She examined her hands which continued to feel heat, as if acknowledging a delayed sense of pain. 

Theo paid no attention to this and glanced at his watch.

“Well, it’s half eleven,” he said. “I best check on that lunch Freya left me in there."

Theo slovenly pulled himself up from his chair, groaning as he supported the weight of his body with the arm-rest.

Aurora covered her face with her hands, rubbing the fatigue from her eyes. Such an early start was unusual to her. With long nights pacing the corridors at home and thinking through the events of the past few weeks, she tended to stay in bed until at least midday. 

She massaged her temple, trying to bat off a dull, persistent headache, and closed her eyes, hearing Theo shuffle into the kitchen and make a jubilant sound of glee at the complexion of his soup. Clearly his daughter’s broth, which through his minimal watchful gaze he had claimed credit for, pleased him.

Aurora smirked. His personal pride in even the smallest of accomplishments, and the infectious positivity that radiated through every movement of his limbs was considerably more charming outside of the context of a stress-filled journey from the Far East.

Shielding her weary face from the world, she dropped her head on the table, and washed over her recent travails in Nelson Hall.

Her time at home had been fruitless. 

Dorcas left the morning after Aurora’s long night in Diagon Alley. She had departed to root herself once more in the mesmeric banality of accountancy. Aurora was still remained bewildered that, in a world built on the premise of rare magical talent being found in a blessed, fortunate minority, her cousin would choose a job that was so inexplicably ordinary. She hadn’t sent any note of thanks about her wand, making Aurora expect that if anything, she was probably more incensed that her human lapse in concentration had been exposed by an individual she thought was beneath her.

With her parents, meanwhile, an emotional drought had persisted for some days since the funeral. Gideon had seldom been home, only returning for fleeting visits to his office, routinely leaving with a well-packed bag under one arm. The opportunities for some sort of conversation or partial reconciliation, to mend a rift that was becoming more of a sordid vacuum as time went on, were yet to arise. How much he suspected or knew about her own ambitions to decipher the truth were thus difficult to gauge. It wasn’t impossible that, so overwhelmed in the miasma of gutter politics, he had assumed she had obeyed his orders. Though the emergence of volatility in his behaviour meant that for all she knew, he had set spies to haunt her every treaded step. It was a discomforting reality, but Aurora now had to assume her father was an obstacle and an opposition to her, rather than the pillar of support that he had been in her defining years. There was something humorously indelicate about the fact that, when in crises as overbearing as the past few months, no matter how much she had done, her first instincts were no different to the four year old Rory with a go-go hairband and freckly face when she cut her knee. It would be to run to mummy or daddy.

Now in a consuming pain that she hid behind a cracked veil of strength, she was forced to swat away these powerful, resonating feelings. Her love of her parents had to be demoted to a hangover effect, a sorry tale of the weaknesses of the human condition. If she opened up to her father, he would do everything he could to keep her out the way and stop her learning the truth for her "safety". 

Aurora's mother, Elizabeth, had been brought low with sickness. Her physical condition was now harmonising with the crumbling of her identity. She remained exclusively within the segmented annex of the house. It had become a grotto to her emotional dissonance. Therefore, to Aurora, it now appeared that her dalliance with vibrant personality was an aberration rather than an inexplicable return to form. 

Whatever enthusiasm had compelled her to instruct Aurora to speak at the funeral had clearly withered away. She had said no more to Aurora since then, to the point that Aurora became so suspicious of her lack of movement that she had interrogated Mardy the house-elf. When his answers were unsatisfactory, she had called in an acquaintance healer from nearby to check that nothing was out of the ordinary. 

The healer, a female relation of Bathilda Bagshot, had said that aside from her alcoholism, clinical depression and decreasing mental sanity, her mother only had a moderate fever. She had told her that they were lucky Elizabeth had kept it together so well for the funeral, because with or without the flu, her behaviour could have had her sectioned by St Mungo’s if any concerned wizard reported it. The healer had also bitterly told her that although wizards could heal people in the gravest of physical situations, St Mungo’s were no better than an alley merchant at dealing with the conditions that destabilise the mind. It was a situation that burdened Aurora with a dense feeling of helplessness, and an incoherent belief that one good conversation with her mother would turn her into the same idol of hers that she looked up to aged twelve. 

Lucius’ jeers and boasts remained untested, so a tetchy uncertainty harboured over her plans today. She did not know if what he had hinted at was a bluff, or if people now knew that she had been the one to scald Greyback and send him off to Azkaban. On a light perusal of the Prophet that Theo had bundled onto her lap, she had discovered that Greyback was to begin his trial later in the afternoon. Her father would no doubt be in attendance in some shape or form, though his specific role there, or in his line of work in general remained elusive to her. She imagined that when she met Laurie at noon, the trigger-happy sort of scumbags would be drawn to her face like a moth to a flame. That was, of course, if any sort of Greyback bounty was hovering above her head. It was unfortunate she felt, that the one action of hers that gave her no regrets, and something of an angelic halo, was also a beacon warning the wanderers of the darkness that she was an inconvenience that needed to be killed. 

She’d had no luck with her father’s office. When he was home he was in it, and when he wasn’t he locked it with a personalised key, probably haggled for with one of the Unspeakables at the Department of Mysteries. Despite their name, they were a partisan crowd whom were not beyond a bribe or the calling in of a favour. More importantly, even the more honourable and principled of men such as Gideon Meadows, shared the requirement to make agreements. Clearly the key attached to his office door, which Aurora had been able to have a proper examination of, only responded specifically to her father’s hand on the specific key. It wasn’t the type you could buy from the local locksmith. She would have to make do with the presentation she had seen through the floorboards on the day of the funeral. 

Her brother’s room had been more accessible. His bedroom, found at the top of the house around the nook of a winding staircase, had already achieved the smell of isolation. The windows had been firmly shut for so long that her footsteps laboured in a denser, unmoving air. It each step across movement more significant as she broke through the settled resilience of the room as she looked for clues on her brother’s activities. The door had been left open but aside from her father’s interruptions, it was a time capsule to a land that time had forgotten. It appeared that not only was the room unchanged since his passing, but also since her leaving for the Far East. 

Ravenclaw banners remained on the wall, its slapdash decoration of a plethora of different paint colours, and also the coloured hand-prints the family had done by the entrance were all still in place. His record collection remained the same, though now party to a thick, unforgiving layer of dust, and his books weren’t that different to his former teenage collection. Aurora was gaining the strong suspicion that Rupert had moved on from personal effects during the past few years. The war had clearly prioritised his time, and understandably so. There was every chance Rupert had skedaddled off and bought a house once he’d been married, but she knew his attachment to this place. She doubted he’d have left the residence until the fighting had abated. Instead the room showed how Rupert had had to freeze his interests, loves and passions, which may have seemed discarded now, in his largely untouched room since his death, but really had been put aside for quite some time. The only disruption to the hyper-cleanliness of Rupert’s orderly ways, along with the smog of drifting time, was the clear searching of the space that had been conducted by her father. 

The few filing cabinets of fine Chesterfield design that were stood proudly against the wall had been opened, their contents searched and then scattered across the floor looking like ripples from a dive in a pool. Their words prised for meaning, the imprint of knees on the ruff of the carpet; all the signs of a frantic examination, in clear desperation of some sort of clue to what he had been doing. He had clearly taken some files as clues, though she imagined that along with the log book he had mentioned to Mad-Eye and Kingsley, she had overheard all he knew. Instead the scrambling hints of his rummaging through the private space of his dead son filled Aurora with an intense sense of pity. 

Worst of all, however, were the drawings Rupert had stuck above his bed. An exceptional sketch artist, his tapestry of landscapes and emotional recollections were coloured onto an assembly of paper that had been permanently stuck to his wall. When she saw the pictures, enchanted so that the figures would blink, move and occasionally run across the canvas, she had to do all she could to resist breaking down. After all she had cried more in the past month than she had in the preceding twenty two years of her life. However, his art had been there and had grown in size across the wall for almost a decade. It expressed in fabulous detail the places he had visited, his friends, the attachment he had to Hogwarts, and most of all his familial ties. They were all a ghastly reminder to her of how his life had been cut short. Those drawings had probably been placed there out of a flowing sense of optimism and remembering the past with age, now they were depressing footnotes that crept across the walls of his room. In particular the drawing of her aged ten with her brother collecting sea shells on the beach, of a tie severed so long ago. With his body moving, and emoting with life, it became little more than a cruel joke played on her by the ides of fortune. 

Whatever had occurred to him, to make him reach his demise in a closeted toilet, remained a strange, contradictory riddle that she was determined to solve.

Though his death was no weirder than what she was doing now, to be fair. Laurie, whom had strolled back into her life, fully formed as the mysterious, dark-haired stranger with his brooding silences and indeterminable inconsistencies that only made him more attractive to her. She had no idea how he had developed a lead on the Death Eaters, she had no idea why she was trusting him, especially after how he had left things six years ago – and more importantly his reappearance seemed illogical. Part of her was expecting him to be a phantom of her imagination and that there would be some trope-ridden twist where a kindly healer tells her he is no more than a projected spectre caused by her descent into madness. Before anything significant came between them, or between themselves and a Death Eater, she would need to solve the riddle of his behaviour.

Still, her reaction was one of sustained sympathy. Not only was there the comfort zone of crawling back into a personal dynamic that had given her a girlish sense of fulfilment, but also the death of Lola Knight was pretty unsettling to imagine. She had been in Rupert’s year, and had been a defiantly non-modish type that cared for nothing other than playing beater for Gryffindor, and ribbing Rupert’s unfortunate academic pedantry at any opportunity. Clearly the domestic strife had unsettled her quidditch ambitions, a sport that had delayed its seasons across the whole of Europe through precautions and turbulence. Before she had her life taken so tragically, Aurora had been told by Laurie she had worked at Aeylop’s Owl Emporium. It was a job she could never imagine her doing, and now, as she had become nothing more than a name on a victim’s list, she found it hard to imagine her at all. The worst bit was the shock of her death, and how it had affected Laurie. She knew it must be true, because of the hollowed nihilism cutting through his usually more conventional sardonicism. Tells of this had only been glimpsed at on the surface of Laurie’s demeanour, but they were there – that was for sure. 

Above all, however it was the orb that Dumbledore had shown her which was resonating in her thoughts. He had it, and its significance remained a mystery to her. He had made no further effort to contact her since their meeting at Hogwartsm and that persuaded her to not say a word about the mystical artefact to him. If he still had the orb, then it wouldn’t work, even if Lucius had probably given it to Voldemort by now. She didn’t think Dumbledore was nefarious, but his withholding of information and the events in Diagon Alley meant she had to prioritise her brother over an old beaker. Even if the beaker was linked to her brother, she wanted to find his killer first. Why it had lit up for her, if the words of the seedy Mr Borgin were correct, was also quite puzzling, however Dumbledore would have to wait.

Theo had been gone from the table for quite a while. 

Before she could pull her hands away from her face however, a tremor of movement in the room unnerved her. Gentle pressure was being applied to the chair adjacent to where she was sitting. Stilted breath flowed into her ear as lips leant in close to her face.

For whatever reason, instinct told her to keep her eyes shut.

After a stuttered syllable, a child’s voice said, “Can you save me from mother?”

Aurora opened her eyes with a jolt. The living room was empty.

Whatever it was, it had gone.

Bloody hell, thought Aurora, what is going on with me?

A moment later Theo came back, triumphantly clutching a bowl of soup.

“Look at me, eh? A chef at last!” he chuckled.

Aurora smiled, and continued their conversation, doing her best to deflect her apprehension. She had no idea if she had imagined what had just happened or if it was real, but ghosts speaking to her was the last thing she needed on her agenda. Nor did she desire nagging dreams to remain in play. Frankly, there were too many demons to slay as it was. 

When she departed for Hogsmeade ten minutes later, she did her best to put her mind on the crucial task at hand, namely tracking down a Death Eater.


	13. Declared Bounty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Laurie sending word of a major breakthrough in their hunt for a Death Eater, Hogsmeade awaits for Aurora, though a certain few challenges present themselves first.

With anxiety afflicting her composure, her apparition was an imperfect success. She landed at Hogsmeade easily enough. Unfortunately, however, she had been indulging herself in the plethora of arresting disquiets troubling her mind. Thus, she stumbled on exit. Aurora hit the ground face first, her shoulders sinking into a deep and parlous blanket of snow. Wintry slush melted either side of her cheeks, which radiated their warmth through the ice. After letting out a stiff groan, she buried both of her hands in the snow, feeling them sink until her knuckles brushed the dirt underneath.

Grimacing somewhat at the mercilessly sapping temperature of the chilly air creeping into her lungs, she pushed herself up onto all fours. Aurora panted at the exertion of energy, before wiping the clinging snowy remnants of her awkward tumble from her face. As frosty water abrasively kissed her palms, she regretted her absence of gloves. 

She let out a deep breath and then clambered into a standing position, her boots muddying the untarnished ocean of white surrounding her.

Aurora recognised this place. Thankfully, her miscue at the end of her apparition had only drifted her a few yards off course. It was a farmer’s field that had belonged to Mr Love. He specialised in the pumpkin trade. His plot of land was a notable landmark on the walk down to Hogsmeade. The turf would be grisly adorned with myriad of crooked scarecrows to ward off opportunistic birds during peak trade season. As Halloween traditionally coincided with the first visit to Hogsmeade, she used to enjoy seeing the gaunt collection of threatening effigies, admiring them like a gothic art display.

In the distance, she could make out Hogsmeade. The village, adorned with thatched roofs and postcard-friendly shop fronts, rested at the foothills below. Over the wooden picket nearby, she saw the meandering path of hardened stone down to the all-wizard settlement. It was swept clear and adorned with the familiar rustic signposts and the occasional lantern or bench, unchanged from her time as a student. 

It was unusual, after four years away, to haunt the sites of her adolescence in search of a killer. Nonetheless, however jarring it felt, and no matter how ironic it was that she had travelled thousands of miles away only to return once more, she was resolute in her ambitions here. Whatever happened at Theo’s house, despite how unsettling it had been, had to be put on the backburner for now.

As she straddled the fence, leaving a messy confession of heavy footsteps behind her, she turned to look at Hogsmeade again. Thick plumes of smoke rose from the chimneys and a quixotical blend of people, faces bowed in the strife of an unseasonal bout of snowfall, could just be made out from her vantage point. 

That’s an unusually large number, she thought, even for a weekend.

Pushing her hair back, she dropped to the ground and lumbered over to the winding path into Hogsmeade, noticing only for the first time that her struggles in the unforgiving bed of snow had brought an audience of three boys.

They were dressed up snugly in scarves, well-tailored coats, and gloves that had clearly been sent from home by their mothers after this bout of unseasonal snowfall. Their scarves muffled their prepubescent voices, as one of the trio called out to Aurora, with his pink lips curved into a sneer across his milky cheeks, “You fell on your face.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” she replied, grumbling as she passed them on the pathway. 

“What did she say?” murmured one of the boys to the other. 

“Something about hemlock, I think,” said another, scratching his head.

Clearly they weren’t muggle borns, she mused bitterly, picking up the pace and leaving the dawdling trio far behind. 

It was a few minutes in to her huffed descent towards Hogsmeade that the pieces fitted together. It was a weekend, and there had been three boys of little more than thirteen greeting her on the outskirts of Hogsmeade, one had even worn a Hufflepuff scarf. She treaded over the matter in her head. 

It’s a Hogsmeade weekend, that’s why so many are here, she realised.

It had come late this year, probably courtesy of the unexpected amount of death taking place. 

Bemoaning Laurie’s moment of breakthrough coinciding with a mass movement of people into a cramped, picturesque dwelling, she checked her pocket to make sure her wand was primed and ready at a moment’s notice.

She also shivered, her coat offering insufficient cover to the arduous weather, and regretted her idiocy once again. 

So obsessed had she been over her the nature of Laurie’s message, and whether he could be trusted, and so overly curious with Dumbledore’s plans and the emotional disintegration of her family, that she had failed to do the most rudimentary of preparations. 

Aurora had completely missed basic observations, like the weather, the number of people in the village expected that day, and whether she’d need to bring anything aside from her wand and her relentless determination. 

Truthfully she had spent time more finding a way to crowbar in her cuppa with Theo than prepping for the rendezvous with Laurie. It was shameful in her view, as for all she knew they were hunting down a Death Eater today. 

The winding path reached a plateau near the entryway to Hogsmeade, with the voices of villagers, and ramblers passing the nearby streets now audible in her ears. Amongst the gruff resonances of older students and locals milling through the village, there was an enthused cluster of declarations being made at the archway into Hogsmeade. Their tones were defiantly rapturous, and she heard them squeak their enthusiasm over the wonders of Zonko’s Joke Shop, and their upcoming first taste of butterbeer. 

Though the pathway down had been an uninterrupted jaunt with the exception of the three confident school pupils, this festering crowd blocked her entry into the village. It was a boisterous brigade of what she assumed was Third Years. They were a rabble as excitable as yapping puppies, and the reality was she’d have to either wait for them to be released to wreak their impulsive havoc on the surrounding area, or find a way to squeeze through. 

The group were gathered around Professor Slughorn, whom stood in the middle of them, his drooped pose accentuating his unorthodox features. It almost looked like they had spotted a walrus at some erratically planned interactive sea-show and had clustered around it take pictures. Also circling the joyful pack was Argus Filch, with his typical morbid expression of passionless disinterest etched across his face. Professor McGonagall was there too. She had seen Aurora and approached from the rear of the party. 

“Professor?” Aurora said, bemused at McGonagall’s sudden eagerness to speak to her. She had avoided Aurora and her winding blind alleys of sneering verbiage for five years at school.

“Meadows,” she said, greeting her with a nod and keeping her voice hushed as Slughorn rambled a few notes on staying with a buddy at all times. “There is going to be a bit of a wait here. As an extra precaution this year, we are giving an additional safety talk in the village before we let the Third Years off on their own.”

The professor was struggling to take the element of short shrift out of her voice and instead opted for a strangely neutral tone, lacking in its usual Scottish tunefulness.

She then asked, “Did you see any pupils lagging behind? We’re missing three.”

Aurora imagined that though the teacher wasn’t petty, she had found it difficult to separate Aurora from the fifteen year old with her odd classroom approach of slovenliness and rude verbal rebellion and the woman she was now. It was aggravated by the fact Aurora had been effortlessly smart enough to get an “E” in the OWL, despite her bare amounts of revision.

With the Scottish accent still distinctly absent, she said, “Three boys to be precise; we have Hagrid looking for them. Did you see anyone on the way down?”

“Well,” said Aurora, trying to be helpful, perhaps out of guilt for her behaviour at Hogwarts, “I saw three up at the top of hill. They were next to Love’s pumpkin patch. One had a Hufflepuff scarf.”

“Oh, that Ignatius yet again,” she bristled, brushing past Aurora and marching off up the path, cursing under her breath.

Aurora waited a few minutes for Slughorn’s piece to reach its denouement. Then sure enough, despite his words evoking for restraint and well-mannered behaviour particularly in – as he vacuously put ‘times like this’ – the throng of children dispersed like highly charged atoms. They moved so quickly away from Slughorn that they almost rebounded off the walls of the shops as they hoovered in the joyful ambience of the village. 

Stepping past the rabble, now that it had suitably dispersed, she inhaled the scent of cooked pastries and warm baguettes nearby, and did her best to ignore any early cravings for lunch by turning her attention to the odours of the nearby herb store. This had the immediate effect of sating her hunger by coarsening her throat with the odious trace of marjoram. It was a herb that was propped up in the shop window. She now only had an urge to cough rather than eat.

Aurora could faintly hear a busking lyrist; boldly play on in the hardening weather. Her body had been formerly obscured from view by the swelling of people by the entrance. Now however, she was in full flow, and her tune had caught the attention a few stragglers whom huddled together in their thick coats and listened to her gentle strumming. As her slivery hair drooped over her eyes when the chord progressions became more intense, Aurora realised that it was the same woman from the Leaky Cauldron. In fact, she was even playing the same song, about the ruddy griffin. 

Admiring her enterprise and her persistence in performing in this weather, wearing what looked like a bear-fur cape, and with enchanted sickles dancing backflips over a coin cup, she moved through the street looking for The Three Broomsticks. 

Though it was far from Christmas, and any decorations of a yule variety remained absent, the snow gave a firm definition of solstice approaching. Meanwhile candlelight poured a golden glow across the windows of every building she passed, and the infectious positivity of the Third Years darting around, to her surprise, was a rather pleasing phenomenon to behold. 

She also revelled in hearing a few elderly women, of Asian descent, stroll past speaking fluently in Mandarin, which Aurora just about had a grasp of when spoken in rapid tongue. They were tourists, excitable travellers whom had battled the elements and ignored the civil strife to come all this way. Their resistance amazed her; in much the same way the smatterings of Portuguese from two young men coming out of Honeydukes, a language she knew none of, (aside from their reference to “Castelobruxo” the Amazonian school), buoyed her spirits. It gave her a sense of the magical community that contrasted with the bleak insularity of her recent thoughts.

The only foreign wizards she had met before had been from Mahoutokoro, whom had been very pleasant members of the expedition to China, or the insufferable few she had spoken to from Beauxbatons or Ilvermorny. They had been part of a rival discovery team for an American bank. 

She had reached the town square, taking in the absurd statue of a winged boar, an isolated beast far away from its perched brothers above the nearby school’s gate. Then the note in her pocket heated up, causing her chest to itch.

Aurora ripped it from her pocket a little too hastily and it fell to the floor, mockingly flying a few feet in a cheap gust of wind. After picking it up, boots crunching on the silt beneath her feet, she unfolded it and looked at the runes.

They had changed. She acknowledged her painful lack of observation once more. Aurora had failed to recognise the paper had been imbued with a simple Protean charm. The runes now said, “Won’t be there until 1pm. I’ll come find you.”

Great, she moaned, he better have something bloody impressive to reveal to keep me hanging around.

That was her hope at least. 

In the past, Laurie had been terrible at keeping to times. During their relationship, he had routinely been late or had met her at unorthodox hours to discuss something really trivial. She hoped that this wasn’t just a meet up to discuss feelings, or some attempt to rekindle a romance that had ended wretchedly through his own choices. That said, however, Aurora had noticed a change in Laurie, no doubt motivated by the death of Lola, an event Aurora still had great difficulty comprehending. He had been ruthless enough to fire into a crowd and cause a riot, not that Aurora had let him, but he would have done so without her there. He had become more enterprising, more resourceful, and a dark fortitude had married with his natural wizarding talent. Truthfully, it had been a somewhat disconcerting transition. Normally he would be late by an hour because he fancied a lie-in. This time there was every possible he had been held up for reasons that might be unsettling to her. Something was off about Laurie, and she was resolute in finding out what it was when he arrived. For now though, she would have to take his word about contacts and methods for finding a Death Eater.

After ducking as a low-flying owl swooped through the street, she decided to take the initiative for once, tired of being reactive to Laurie or making corrections to lapses in her own judgement. Rather than going straight to the Three Broomsticks, she headed right, down a less populated region of the village, to J.Pippin’s Potions.

Reaching the store, she pushed the door, grumbling as it caught on the latch. With another push it swung open, knocking against a chair near the entrance.

“Watch it,” came the shrill complaint, each syllable inflected with a Lancashire accent. 

Aurora stepped into the room, wincing at the overbearing musk of scrubbed sides and jarred concoctions. 

“Yes,” said the voice again, “can I help you.”

She turned to see a well-groomed man dressed in a white overall greet her presence with a scowl. As customer service went, he had an unusually passive-aggressive manner. Keeping her composure, she strode over to the counter. In many respects her approach now replicated that of an authoritative teenager in one of those terrible muggle ‘movies’. The ones she had sat through where an adolescent swans up to a convenience store and buys ‘booze’ with a ‘fake I.D’. 

“I was wondering if you have a potion that I would like to acquire?” she said, tilting her head. Aurora then added, “You are Mr Pippin right?”

“It’s Doctor Pippin, deary,” he balked. “This is a chain store and the man you’re looking for has been dead for about ten years.”

“Oh,” she said unabashed.

“What is it you want?” he demanded. 

It was pretty clear he could detect she wasn’t a typical customer. She glanced over him once more. Looking at his clean cut demeanour and unhealthy disdain, he was quite likely a failed healer or a disgraced potioneer whom now had to settle for a middle-of-the-road job predominantly aiding old ladies with cures for their legs and inelastic joints. He didn’t need a confident young woman striding in, almost mocking him with her composure and graceful smile. In his mind it was quite feasibly a practical joke. After all, it wasn’t impossible that she was an errant NEWT student, looking to humiliate a man whose career hadn’t reached where he wanted it to. 

Realising she may have misjudged the matter with her masquerade of confidence, she said bluntly, “Veritaserum.”

“Oh you wouldn’t find that here, sister,” he said, shaking his head, “I can tell you that for sure.”

“For the Ministry,” continued Aurora, sincerely hoping her bluff had worked.

The man stopped shaking his head. Like there had been a flick of a switch, his expression brightened, and with some vigour he cracked his knuckles and said, “Oh terribly sorry about all that. Can’t be too careful! I thought you were just some bird off her rocker or a prank joke.”

“Don’t worry I understand, sir” Aurora replied, staying cool, but cheering wildly inside. 

“Ah, there are no sirs here! Most call me Avery,” he beamed. 

He offered his hand, “Pleasure to meet you.”

After they shook, he said, “Yeah, I get a lot of business from this now. Can’t say I blame all of your lot wanting to make the most of your job’s position. In times like this.”

In times like this, he had said. 

That was how everyone was justifying their decisions now, thought Aurora disapprovingly. 

She then said, “Yes, I can imagine.”

“Right,” said the man, brushing his smooth chin before lifting an iron plated box from below the till and placing it on the counter. 

After having a quick glance out the window, making sure no one was about to come in, he chuckled, “One of the best things about a small store, is that you only need to serve one at a time most days.”

As he opened the box, a tattoo of a yellow rose crept into view as the hem of his sleeve dropped a few inches down his arm. 

With the jangle of a key the box opened, revealing an impressive selection of potions inside. They shimmered a hypnotic symphony of colours, like an innocent spring-time rainbow, though their contents were anything but child-like. Her knowledge of Potions was limited, but she could see that at least one of them was a sample of Amortentia, an unusual curiosity for a ministry official to obtain on business. 

“Well, I have some good wares here, has to be said. See that one,” he mused, gesturing to a potion in the left-hand corner of the box as Aurora looked over the phials.

“That one is experimental, but it is doing pretty well in Europe. They call it the Wolfsbane potion; the Ministry haven’t let it in the British Isles yet. I reckon it’s because they secretly hate all of them!” he cackled.

“Who?” she said.

“Werewolves,” grinned Avery. “Though I get clients for it over here, don’t you worry. Ministers are many things, but morally consistent isn’t one of them.”

“So, is the Veritaserum in here?” asked Aurora, the turn in conversation had made her a little queasy.

“Ah, yep,” he chortled, “It’s this one here.”

At that point, he prodded an exceptionally thin container that resembled a thermometer in shape, though the liquid inside was clear. For all intents and purposes, it could have been water.

Aurora knew it. It wasn’t a shock that Ministry officials and workers abused their position. What was more shocking was that they banned substances but routinely purchased them themselves for their own use and pleasure, perhaps to use on each or indulge in their own skulduggery. Her hunch had been correct, and Avery was just a middle-man who greased his pockets through a little interest on the transactions. 

“So is it being paid for the usual way?” asked Avery.

Drawing a blank, unsure what that would be, she simply blinked and said, “Yes.”

“Good,” he answered. “So you will charge it on your expenses. I will write up the form saying you came in for a lumbago pain reliever or something, and then I will whip the invoice over to your office. You alter the figures in your place accordingly and sign it off. No one traces it that way.”

“Can’t I pay over the counter?”

“Crikey, of course not!” he said, alarmed by her ignorance on the matter, “Then one of your lot could do me in for dodgy dealing. No, you have to get your hands dirty too I am afraid. Not worth the risk otherwise, that was the agreement with our mutual source at the Ministry.”

He was uneased by her choice of question, and Aurora lamented her thoughtless reply. Shuffling on the spot, he inquired, “What did you say your name was again?”

“I didn’t,” said Aurora, “It’s Fiona Williams.”

That was the name of the squib assistant of her father at work. She hoped Avery wasn’t too clued up with office staff in the Law Enforcement departments.

“And you work at the Ministry?” 

“No, I am the assistant to a Wizengamot official.”

Avery whistled, “Big fish to come in here.”

“He has his reasons,” replied Aurora nonchalantly. 

“I bet he does,” said Avery, “but I am going to need to know which one he is for the form. Only fair for us all here, don’t worry you can remove the name on your receipt at your own leisure. Scribble it off in the office, but I will keep my record as insurance. Long as no snooping Eddies come around that will be that.” 

Aurora paused for a moment. Inevitably her father would find out what she had done eventually, she doubted he would be pleased. Though the need was urgent. 

“Gideon Meadows,” she said, feeling a sinking feeling in her stomach. 

“Uh-huh,” said Avery, filling out the form with a raven-quilled pen. “How do you spell that? Is it G-I-D-E-O-N?” 

“Yep,” said Aurora. 

“I am also going to need your address here,” he then said, nodding down at the page.

Aurora sighed. 

If I have given away his name already, she deliberated. 

She filled in her address, her hand cumbersomely cramping midway through. It had been a long time since she had used a quill and paper. 

“Thank you,” said Avery, giving her the phial which she tucked away with her wand. “I will fly the message off to your office, and you can handle it from there. Comes with my twenty five percent interest fee as I am sure our friend made you aware.”

A sturdy Great Grey swooped in through the window by the door, Avery flicking it open with his wand as it approached. After tying the notice to its leg, he turned on his radio. 

Moaning at the Warbeck warbling, he tuned the dial to a folk channel instead. 

At that point Aurora purchased a second potion, and after signing an identical form, she sincerely hoped she would never have to use it. Avery then closed his iron box and tucked it back under the counter. 

“Well,” he announced, “it’s my lunchbreak now. I hope you enjoy your purchases, use them wisely, and most of all discretely, without mentioning where you got it. Don’t tell your friends about me, just your enemies!”

He let out another chuckle before doing a groove to the folk falsetto blasting out of the speaker. It gave the situation a pertinacious sense of black comedy as a grooving young man who sold dangerous potions as a side job to corrupt officials jollily let out a few dance moves in his store. He was like a braying jackal mocking the poorly attuned reptile who had wandered into his abode. 

Aurora left without another word. She was convinced that she needed the Veritaserum, and that worse came to the worst, she could need the second potion too. Her instinct had told her that some of the local stores would be swimming in below-the-counter transactions. The fact Ministry officials came in for back-alley deals that were then charged on peoples’ taxes did not shock her. 

Laurie still unnerved her, if they needed to wean information out of anyone today; she wasn’t sure what he’d do to make sure they got it. As dangerous a potion as Veritaserum was, it was better than the alternatives.

As Aurora headed to the Three Broomsticks, her coat pocket heated up for the second time.

The runes now said, “An hour from now.”

Aurora checked her watch, it was quarter past twelve.

Sod it, she complained, if he delays it again he can visit me at home. 

With a hint of resignation she embraced the rowdy atmosphere of the Three Broomsticks, her pleasant feeling towards the cheery children taking a turn for the sour. Their abrasive gasps of pleasure at the Butterbeer bothered her to no end as she sifted through the queue to find a table. 

Helping herself to tap water in a nearby jug, she marooned herself at a lonely spot away from the main booths and conversational crowds. Yawning over the creeping pipe smoke burning from the deck of benches to her right, she glazed over hoping to somehow daydream the next hour away in the relative security of the pub. Part of her thought she had now reached her own personal nadir.

Her attention was then consumed by a charm operating in an unusual gap to her left. The spell wasn’t obvious, but the affects were traceable. Thankfully however unobservant Aurora was at the more mundane issues in life, it took a pretty outstanding charm to fool her. 

It was a concealment charm, adorned with a persuasion spell similar in complexion to the one that had existed by her father’s office. It was a pretty ballsy move, to do such a complicated and obviously suspicious spell in a public place but Aurora could not help but admire their handiwork. She was sitting reasonably close to the toilets at the back and dozens of people had passed the altered section in the room, without giving it a moment’s thought. 

She imagined even Hogwarts staff members had been fooled whilst Madam Rosmerta the owner had clearly been flummoxed enough by the additional suggestion spell to not question why a table had disappeared from her property. The carpeted gap meant nothing to any of the stragglers wandering off to the loo.

With a flick of her wand she removed the suggestion spell whilst sat on her chair, batting off the urges in her brain to admire the stag antlers above her rather than look at the open space. 

Whomever it was hiding themselves from sight, they were unfortunate. They had initiated their plans when a curse-breaker, who had spent four years looking for detectable charms in caves older than most recorded civilisations, just happened to rock up for a glass of tap water at the same time as them. 

Still marvelling at the impressiveness of the spell, she tried not to draw attention as she spied upon the chink in the armour of their magic. The concealment charm worked like a bubble, deflecting the eye from all that were in view of it, and giving space to hide inside. It was almost, in the variety performed near her, like an invisibility tent, though it would take a great effort to pull off flawlessly. Those of a more rudimentary nature would reflect the light and end up looking like a glass dome, obvious to anyone in view. Ones of a more advanced persuasion such as the one wallowing in The Three Broomsticks didn’t suffer from this. Instead the spell gave off a gentle hiss from the strain of the magic. Almost sounding like the inflating of a balloon, this was hard to spot in a noisy pub. They had tried to obfuscate it too with the suggestion charm.

The size of the spell meant tells such as this was inevitable unless you’d done ten thousand of them and understood the theory like precise equations. Meanwhile, the spell of suggestion was obvious if you knew there was one there. Having just combatted one at home last week, it hadn’t fooled her, and had convinced her that something was hidden from view.

Pretending to be admiring a painting nearby, she got up from her chair and strode towards the region of the magic. It was very possible that there was nothing dark or ulterior about the spell, as it is the sort of thing she could have imagined using during NEWT year to get the rest of the world to piss off. 

The past few days had made her tetchy however, and sitting idly by would potentially be even more complacent than the decisions she had made in the past few weeks. Also she had no wish to bathe in her worrying thoughts. It was better to confront this danger than to think about Laurie, Dumbledore, her father, or that chilling voice in her ear. That was the gateway to insanity. 

She stroked her chin in recognition of the masterful stroke work on the canvas. It depicted a fine wooden ship called “The Barnabus” collapse into the sea. It was magically enhanced to move, breaking apart at the behest of an opportunistic whale. 

Checking no one was watching, she turned to the bubble and said, “There’s some pretty wonderful artwork going on here, some real attention to detail. It is almost as good as your charm.”

She heard a shot glass drop in seeming mid-air, “Don’t worry, I checked. No one is looking apart from me. All the rest are too busy feasting on fried grease. I don’t know who you are, but unless you want me to head over to Madam Rosmerta and tell her of this little bit of magical diversion, you better tell me what is going on.”

The bubble wobbled slightly, briefly coming into view.

“Your spell is starting to drain. It is just a matter of practice,” she said consolingly, pointing her wand at the space. “Now, before anyone comes, I can fix it for you. Judging by the fact you haven’t shot me, I am inclined to give you a chance.”

A moment later the bubble came into view again and Aurora waded through it. She passed through the boundary, which gave off the feeling of pressing a finger in jelly.

It was a risky move, especially if it was some hostile dark wizard sent to spy on her hiding in there. The alternative however, was throwing an ashtray at it and watching the spell break. That would only cause a scene. She had no ambition to leave too much of a presence here. 

Aurora slotted herself onto a chair. Within the concealment bubble was a table, and sitting across either side of it were two boys, both of whom could have been no older than sixteen. 

“So,” she said, “what are you doing here, lads? I take it by the fact you didn’t hex my face into the Stone Age that you aren’t after me.”

“After you?” replied one of them, rubbing his hair at the back so it appeared as scruffy and as unkempt as a Caledonian marsh. “What a curious thing to say!”

“I know Prongs,” replied the other, giving his shoulders a stretch before turning his attention to Aurora, “I think this madam has a sense of the self-obsessed. Not healthy in this day and age.”

“Though to be fair,” said the ruffled haired boy called ‘Prongs’. “Padfoot was looking at you for a while because he thinks you are very fit.”

“Hey,” said Padfoot, “Just because Lily burned you again.”

Aurora’s lips crooked into a droll smile, “Well, you are pretty cute yourself, though more in a handsome little brother way.”

Prongs laughed, whilst the other gave an accepting nod, taking the comment on his erratically-stubbled chin.

“Ok then,” continued Aurora, “I will just do this whilst you explain why you’re hiding in a pub.”

She pointed her wand a foot above her head and, with a few non-verbal counter spells; she strengthened the charm surrounding them. The hiss disappeared and the fluctuating reveal of the bubble faded from sight, the concealment charm now operating at full power. Without a dark detector it would be impossible to distinguish.

Padfoot looked at her with an element of awe as she effortlessly performed the manoeuvre. 

Looking at his slightly adrift jaw, she said, “Oh, Charms is pretty much the only thing I’ve got. I was pretty much crap at nearly everything else unless it involved numbers and old cave carvings.”

“Besides,” she said, once the spell was over, “It wasn’t until OWL year that I could do a charm like that so big. So being, what NEWT students? You’re only a little behind me.”

“Actually,” said Prongs, “we’re Fifth Years.”

“Hmm,” replied Aurora, “most impressive.”

She had, thriving on the rapport, actually lied. Though she could do a concealment charm from the age of fourteen, she doubted it would have been as good as this one until she’d reached Sixth Year. 

Feeling a little outplayed, she glanced around the outside of the bubble, seeing oblivious pub goers amble by and the toilet door open and close from the first bout of post-lunch drinks. 

“So what is that you’re drinking?” she asked the pair of them, “It seems like an unsuitable choice for a couple of underage wizards.”

“Well, it is actually firewhisky, but only a single shot. We have business to attend to,” said Padfoot, turning his voice up an octave and doing his best to impersonate an old Ministry gentleman.

“And frankly, I don’t get the appeal myself, it’s not overly nice,” complained Prongs

“We are only having it because aren’t meant to,” said Padfoot.

“Did you use a confundus charm on Rosmerta?” asked Aurora. 

“No, we're just friendly with some of the locals at the Hog's Head. We smuggled it in from there under our jackets, tastes vile though,” said Prongs, taking off his glasses and giving them a wipe, before also noting, “It’s better than that Gamp Gregarious though. My father tried the challenge last summer – 100 galleons.”

“He chundered 100 galleons worth of damage, didn’t he?” chortled Padfoot, revealing his immaculate teeth as he craned his neck back and laughed.

“Oh yes, spewed all over Tom’s trophy cabinet. Not been seen too favourably at the Leaky Cauldron since,” noted Prongs. 

“Anyway, away from the diversions, what are you two doing here?” Aurora said, trying to press on with understanding the purpose of their spell.

“Can’t you see,” beamed Padfoot, “enjoying a drink in peace?”

“Well, having a drink,” corrected Prongs. “As we said, it leaves a lot to be admired.”

After a pause, Prongs stuck his chest out and said, “Plus we’re celebrating my great quidditch success. What was it, 310-40 against Ravenclaw last week?”

“I could just go off and tell Madam Rosmerta, you know,” muttered Aurora, trying to cut through the diverting camaraderie of the two boys. 

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Prongs.

“Why’s that?” she demanded. 

“Because you have your own neck to worry about,” he revealed.

“See that woman over there,” said Padfoot, directing Aurora’s gaze to a curly haired woman on a table at the eastern side of the pub. “She’s been watching you since you came in. In fact she followed you in, technically. It’s Alice Longbottom in case you didn’t know. An Auror.”

Prongs took over and gestured to the charismatic man, with windswept hair and a thick beard who was offering her a drink. He said, “Luckily that charming lothario has kept her attention for the last five minutes, but you’re lucky. Otherwise she’d have seen us all when you accosted us.”

“So someone is spying on me, how does that help you?” said Aurora, frustrated to have been outwitted by teenagers. The fact she was unsure over whether they were telling the truth only exposed her inability to watch her movement. 

“Well, we did also walk past you earlier; you were heading off to the medicine shop,” observed Prongs. 

“And?” said Aurora, still not completely following their thread. What she had done in the store was murky, but they weren’t to know.

“That's true, I can't prove anything from that. Though, all in all, it doesn’t look good does it?” whispered Prongs. “First you drift in here with your brooding and also, I know who you are.”

“Really?” said Aurora, raising an eyebrow. 

“Yep, you’re Moony’s friend from when he was in First Year. The Seventh Year who kept helping him out with all his lost books. It is Aurora isn’t it?” he said, with a glint in his eye. His voice had a satisfied ring to it now, as Aurora’s hesitant pause clarified his incisive deduction. 

“Oh by the way, my name’s James,” said Prongs. 

“I’m Sirius”, said the one known before as ‘Padfoot’.

“And we’d rather you didn’t say a thing,” said James. “Firstly, because you have a tail, who is now glancing at the empty table you had been sitting in five minutes ago. If you head to the bar to dob us in, she will be back on your case and Alice will be following you through the village no doubt, unless you confront her. That could be a messy affair indeed. Secondly, I read the papers. Or, Lupin reads them and has an annoying habit of reciting the news out loud to all his friends. Long story short: My Dad knows Alice, who knows your father in the Wizengamot. Even if oddly, you don't seem to know her. I am guessing with all the cloak and dagger going on, you don’t want them knowing about your gallivanting adventures in Hogsmeade?”

“Checkmate, Prongs,” said Sirius. They knocked their full shots of firewhisky together and settled them down again, without bringing the drinks to their lips.

Aurora could only laugh at the skill of their wordplay, as much as it hindered her. She was no more than a reactive participant in their carousel of sharp logic, “Well played.” 

“Anyway, are you in the Resistance?” asked Sirius. 

“Hmm….I am resisting if that is what you mean?” said Aurora.

“Go on,” encouraged James. He was leaning forward, in his chair, to the extent it was propped at an angle. He was desperate to hear any gossip of fighting Death Eaters.

It was unusual contradiction. Clearly these two boys were arrogant, selfish berks. Nonetheless, Aurora saw that they possessed an unflappable determination in their pursuits, and an intelligence that was both immature and yet beyond their years.

“I asked first,” rebutted Aurora. 

“Alright. Well, we’re waiting for someone to arrive,” said James. 

“So am I,” said Aurora with a sigh. 

“And, we could do with your help thinking about it,” said James, pausing on the last syllables as if it were quite a revelation.

“Good idea Prongs. We’re a man short,” said Sirius, gnashing his teeth in anticipation, “Oh I can’t wait for this!”

“Calm down Padfoot. Basically, Remus, your buddy from first year has grown up into Mr Righteous,” laughed James, letting out a snort of derision, in distaste at his friend’s decision. 

“He thought our idea was mad,” admitted Sirius.

“But we don’t let scum get away with it. No matter what our prefects tell us,” said Sirius, pulling hair from his eyes, and raising a mocking finger at James, re-enacting Remus’ rant from the night before. 

“Sorry, Remus Lupin is a prefect?” said Aurora, genuinely flabbergasted by the revelation that the sickly, shy boy she met as a First Year had found a position of authority. 

“Uh-huh, and our other buddy Wormface is a coward,” said Sirius.

“What are you trying to do?” asked Aurora still confused over the matter. 

“Well, to be frank, we’re here to get rid of a problem at school,” answered James. 

“MacNair, to be precise. The shitty weasel son of a shitty weasel Death Eater,” said Sirius.

“The spawn of Walden MacNair is called Alistair MacNair,” explained James. “He is in Seventh Year and he’s been selling information about pupils to snatchers. You know, telling them all the things they like to hear. Who has the tricky parents, who has letters from home, and which pupils are probably going to fight You-Know-Who.”

“His dad probably milks him for stories too,” pointed out Sirius.

“Disgraceful, a student endangering all those around him,” growled James, his face turning into one of authentic bitterness for the first time. 

“Lupin wanted to tell a teacher about him. Problem is, MacNair is too good at concealing his evidence,” said Sirius, 

“So we want to catch him in the act. When we do, we’ll see who he has been talking to. We intercepted his post last week. From that, we observed that he should be leaving this pub and heading off to meet his source any time now,” mused James, looking at his watch. 

“He is sitting upstairs. As soon as he scarpers, we’re following him,” stated Sirius.

“How?” asked Aurora. 

“We have a method,” revealed James, “Problem is it is a method that can only fit two people, and that’s at a push in all honesty.”

After a moments hesitation he pulled out a slippery fabric from his pocket. He tugged at his trouser for a good few seconds, drawing more and more of it out until several yards of stunningly lucid material rested on the table. Aurora asked if she could hold it. James nodded.

“It’s an invisibility cloak,” said Sirius. 

“This is beautiful,” she said, rubbing the smooth, glistening texture of the coat between her fingers. Fascinated by such magical curiosities, a host of questions came to mind.

Before she could ask any however, James said, very impatiently, “Yes, yes, well we can all admire it later. We have stuff to do. Have you done a disillusionment charm before?”

“I have done far too many of them,” admitted Aurora.

“Good, well you follow us from the rear, your spell will ward off Alice Longbottom, and provide us with back up,” said Sirius.

“Sound like a good plan?” asked James.

“I do have some time to kill actually,” conceded Aurora, intrigued by the whole scenario, despite her relucatance to veer too far off course. 

“Excellent, then your mind is made up!” laughed Sirius.

They waited, stewing at the table until a ginger-haired boy, with a three day beard, and a muscled build left the upstairs of the pub. Ignoring the remarks of the anarchic figheads, either to do with his broad chin or carrot coloured hair, he left the pub, the bell jangling to signify his exit. 

Sirius and James looked at each other, they then both stood up. Aurora now saw them at full height. James was short for his age, with scruffy hair, pointedly spiking at the back, and his glasses appeared to rest on a face of pure self-confidence. He was a skinny build, but had the pose of a wealthy prince and the demeanour of a well-nurtured child. Sirius was perhaps taller than expected for his age, with long brown hair and solemn eyes, along with half formed stubble. There was a certain aloofness and attractiveness to his looks and mannerisms.

They gestured at Aurora, and James said, “That was MacNair.”

Then both the boys picked up the shots which were still full and downed them.

Noting its horrid taste, James spat saliva on the ground, “Eurgh!” he said. 

“Come on let’s go!” added Sirius. 

It was a long walk, out beyond the boundaries of the village. MacNair took them on a twisting route from the Three Broomsticks to the woodland below. He occasionally glanced back behind him to ensure no one was following him. Thankfully his journey consisted of a descent down some stone steps that tickled the breadth of a hill. If they had been forced to trudge behind through the snow, the noise and their deep footprints would have made it a considerably more challenging ordeal. Alice Longbottom, if she had been spying on her, had been discarded at the Three Broomsticks, nowhere to be seen now. She assumed Sirius and James remained in front of her, and she also hoped everything they said was true and that this wasn’t a three man trap.

In reality she felt obliged to stop a student from tipping off thugs about pupils, however much of a diversion it may have been. 

After a while, with Hogsmeade discernible only as a dot in the hills that she could measure between her finger and thumb, they entered the woods. Only fifty yards in they found a grassy clearing, protected from the elements by a canopy of trees and a host of wildflowers, where a man was waiting for MacNair. It was a beautiful location, an anomaly of sanctity where two men had gone to arrange murder. 

He was sitting on a tree stump. The man wore a ragged black tie and a top hat.

“Hello, me boy,” he said gruffly, giving MacNair a pat on the shoulder.

“Alright, Top Hat how’s it going?” said MacNair. His voice possessed an element of swagger that Aurora loathed. 

She was hiding behind a tree for cover, the branches brushing her shoulders. The disillusionment spell was still in full effect. Thankfully, she saw a flash of James’ trainer, and realised they had both taken a position under that cloak of their across the other side of the clearing- she wasn’t alone.

“It’s all well thanks, business is booming,” he said.

He screwed his face into a wink, at which point Aurora realised he was missing left eyelid. 

“That’s good to know,” replied MacNair.

“Yep, anyway mate, I haven’t got overly long. Our friends could only spare you a few minutes, there is quite a lot happening at the moment.”

“Oh don’t worry, you’ll like this,” he said cheerfully. 

“What is it?” asked Top Hat. 

“A list of names,” said MacNair. “I have been enchanting doors and such. These are people whom are looking to join Dumbledore next year. They all think he has a plan. Whether that’s true or not, the freaks on this list are all looking to rally around him. It took a few months to get a definitive name sheet, but I had spells on half the corridors, this is as much proof as I can get.”

“I see,” said Top Hat, taking a scroll of parchment off of MacNair and giving it a scan. He propped it on his knee, with one leg on the stump, giving the page a grunt of approval. 

MacNair leaned over his shoulder and added, boastfully, “I have highlighted the mudbloods in red. For example, this one, some mudblood bitch by the name of, erm,” he scrolled through the parchment, “Lily Evans.”

A millisecond after he had finished saying her name, an enraged roar ruminated from the edges of the nearby branches, shaking leaves off of the trees. The Invisibility Cloak had slipped off. Two boys had been revealed to the pair conspiring on the grassy field. One of whom was running at them, trampling the ground with his wand raised in incandescent fury. It was James, filled with insatiable rage. 

He fired a spell at Top Hat and MacNair. 

They only just dropped their parchment in time, MacNair deflecting the beam of red light into the sky.

“You idiot James!” said Sirius, palming his face in resignation.

“Going to have to do better than that, Potter,” snarled MacNair.

He took a few steps back and fired a few more shield charms as James’ manic attack continued. Further strands of red light arrested Aurora’s senses as a cacophony of noise came from James’ mouth. He was shouting a stream of curses, his wand spinning in his hand from the sensation.

For his part, Top Hat seemed a rather handy wizard. With a flourish of his own wand, he threw a retaliatory spell back at James. Unlike the expressions of colour that had established the conflict, it was a transfiguration spell. It was advanced magic which sent knives in James’ direction. Was it not for Sirius overcoming his astonishment at James’ berserker approach, then James would have been a goner, his defence non-existent and his body exposed to any well-timed counter-spell. Thankfully Sirius shot at the knives which exploded with a firework like bang, shooting sparks across the clearing, obscuring everyone’s vision. The air was now a dense blanket of red fog, sizzling above a green, uneven surface. 

“You fool, MacNair,” cried Top Hat, “did you not notice you had been followed?”

Aurora took this as her cue to enter the fray. It had taken her longer than Sirius to overcome the absurdity of James’ astonishingly ill thought out attack. Their surprise at its primal expression was all that had saved him from being shot down.

“Boreos,” Aurora said once again, thinking of the night on the train.

Now through the mist, she could see MacNair crawling on the ground, wheezing as the fog slowly diffused, struggling westwards, unknowingly drifting in the direction of Sirius. In contrast to MacNair, Sirius had resisted the fog pretty well, due to the fortune of entering the fray late and not reaching the epicentre of the explosion. He couldn't see through it, however. The mist sizzled like cooked fat when it crept through the trees.

James meanwhile, was lying on the grass, winded, and at the mercy of anyone fortunate to spot him through the hazardous vapour. Top Hat was standing only feet away from him, with one hand over his mouth, and another on his wand. As the redness thinned he saw James on the floor, panting and heaving, his wand far from his grasp. With a pernicious smile, he raised his wand theatrically over his head and shouted, “Cruc-”

“Stupefy” cried Aurora just in time. 

The stunning spell missed Top Hat’s body and instead fizzled through the mist and knocked the hat off of his head, revealing a bald, shiny scalp. 

He turned in her direction, quizzical at the use of the curse. He was unable to see as far as Aurora could. Top Hat fired a stunning spell in her general direction, which missed by twenty feet. 

With a smirk she disarmed him, thinking “Expelliarmus” in her head as she pointed her wand. 

The spell also managed to knock him back, and he staggered, tripping over the tree stump in the middle of the clearing. He fell to the floor. His wand meanwhile, flew up in the sky. 

Mustering all the intensity she could, Aurora pointed her wand up through the dense mare of scarlet fumes and shouted “Bombarda”.

The spell cracked from her wand like a sniper shot. Hitting the target square on, Top Hat’s wand exploded thirty feet in the air, a yellow deluge of light shining through the trees like a beacon. 

A whoosh of euphoria swept through her soul. The sensational power of her spell seemed to make the sky reverberate with noise. 

She had seen that spell used before by Garrett, the chief curse breaker in their company. Half-goblin and son of a Gringotts board director; he had possessed a remarkable cauldron of power. Whilst people such as Aurora surveyed mountainsides and told him where to point to make entry, he would fire his spell from hundreds of yards away and make holes as large as craters for teams to get through. Though she hadn’t achieved anything of that magnitude, the canon-like feeling of her wand was a thrill she had never experienced before. 

Aurora then dissipated the fog, undoing her night vision just before the incantation so she wouldn’t be blinded in the furore. 

Typically in her jubilance, she had forgotten about MacNair, who was now able to see Aurora foolishly grin at her own accomplishments. He turned his wand in her direction and shouted “Stupefy.”

It was a stunning spell, hitting her in the shoulder, throwing her twenty feet across the clearing. Unable to control her movements and dazed by the impact, she fell to the ground with a thud, seeing sparks. Her head felt heavy and she rolled to one side. Her eyes closed against her will.

Aurora didn’t remember the next few minutes until Sirius pointed at her face and said, “Renervate”.

She saw his concerned expression loom over her.

With a smile, he then offered a hand up and said, “Come on.”

With a moan, Aurora then struggled to her feet.

She stumbled at the first attempt, but Sirius pulled her into a standing position and handed back her wand. 

“Some pretty awesome magic you did there,” he said, taking one of her arms and helping her over to the tree stump.

MacNair was unconscious, with blotchy and painful rashes obscuring his features. Aurora recognised the spell; Sirius must have got him with a stinging hex. 

James was sitting cross legged on the ground, mourning his cracked glasses. He had one hand on his wand, guarding Top Hat. The snatcher sat wandless, propped up on the tree stump. He had been placed in a leg-locker curse, presumably also by Sirius. 

“My glasses,” whinged James.

“What can I say, mate,” laughed Sirius, wishing to sound stern but unable to dismiss the humour of the situation. “You’re a bloody idiot, one mention of Lily Evans and you becoming a raging loon.”

“You know,” said Aurora, her bearing starting to return, “with security so tight near Hogsmeade, I am shocked no one is here after all that noise.”

“Oh, that was James’ first thought too,” said Sirius, his voice then turned into an angry bark as he added, “We did a quick check over and it turns out this place isn’t just any old patch of grass. There are about, 2,000 muffling charms on this bit of the wood. I haven’t learnt to apparate so I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I am pretty certain this whole area is protected from anything other than physical entry from the path. This is probably where all the low-lives come to sit around a campfire and tell each other their glorious stories of beating up muggles. Got to admire the abhorrent nature of setting it up so close to a school.”

James spat at Top Hat, “You’re a scumbag.”

“Don’t worry about me,” laughed Top Hat, struggling with his legs, “I’d worry about her.”

“Why?” shouted Sirius, wand pointed at his throat.

“Oh, you’ll see,” cackled Top Hat, “Sweetie, take a look in my chest pocket.”

With Sirius keeping his weapon poised in case of any funny business, she delved into his ruined tuxedo and pulled out a wad of papers.

They were Christmas card sized, and each picture contained a sketch, in pencil texture, of various people. They were unmoving illustrations, like that made by a muggle, almost given out in mass copy for use on the go.

The first sketch was that of Mad-Eye Moody, and a reward of five hundred galleons offered for his capture or death .She flicked through the drawings. To her shock it was clear that the thugs had unionised in a way she hadn’t thought possible, perhaps working with the Death Eaters. They were getting rewards for doing their bidding.

They were no longer just targeting muggle borns, rival crooks, or muggles, they had lists of people to take down from the high echelons of society.

Barty Crouch was one of the sketches. Dumbledore appeared on another (priced at ten thousand galleons), and a blank card detailed a hundred galleons for killing any member of “The Vigilant. The illustration here was no more than a smear of red crayon, resembling their face paint. Another was for Dedalus Diggle and then there were a dozen for various Ministry officials who clearly weren’t playing ball with the Death Eater’s ambitions. Then, when she reached the last one, she froze.

It was her.

Lucius hadn’t been bluffing.

They were offering five hundred galleons, as much as they wanted for Moody. The Death Eaters had written on the card an additional line too, saying, “If kept alive and delivered to Greyback, the reward is doubled.”

“Came out yesterday, hun,” giggled Top Hat, “all the people like me have one.”

She looked back at the card, there was no mistake. With the brown hair, and dark eyes, it was an expertly drawn portrait of her. 

Curling her lip in disgust, she stunned him.

She turned to Sirius and said, “We’ve been here quite a while, if I were you I’d take James and go.”

“But what about that list?” asked James, insistently.

“What about it?” replied Aurora.

“MacNair has to be arrested for this, surely?” protested James, banging his fist in the weeds.

“He won’t be,” said Aurora. “You give Dumbledore that list and MacNair will just deny he wrote it. So will his Dad, who is pretty matey with some high up people in the Ministry. He might be a Death Eater, but no one can prove it, can they?”

“The listening devices though, surely…”

“You have a lot to learn James. He was bullshitting. You can’t bug Hogwarts like that, it has ancient spells weaved through it to resist that sort of thing. He just wrote a list of his enemies and gave it to a brute-for-hire. MacNair wanted it to sound more credible, that’s all.”

“We can’t leave you after this though,” said Sirius, with a grain of concern. 

“Yes, you can,” she said, cutting across his misplaced sympathy. “I’ll obliterate Top Hat’s memories here, and leave him for his criminal buddies to find. No doubt they will punish him enough. As for MacNair….well I have no choice really.”

She murmured to herself briefly beofre saying, "Hogwarts is North-West of here right?"

James nodded,

Aurora pointed at the sky and exclaimed, "Accio."

Turning back to the pair of them she said, "Give it a few moments."

Eventually a white oblong, sped towards them from out of the sky. It was a stretcher. It landed in the woodland clearing, and duly hovered by the concussed and wounded MacNair. With a hint of reluctance, Sirius added two and two together chucked him on. The straps magically came together with a click, securing MacNair’s body to the bed.

Aurora pointed at it and said, “Locomotor” thinking of the hospital wing a few miles beyond them. 

It soared into the distance, like a particularly saturnine magic carpet. 

“I didn’t like doing that,” she explained, “but we can’t prove what a horrible person he is, and if I left him here Top Hat’s buddies would kill him. Before realising who his Papa is and getting their balls roasted and fed to the dogs. He won’t mention the duel, he’d be in more trouble than you if he did. He can deal with the awkward questions from Madam Pomfrey when he wakes up. Just keep him on his toes for the rest of the year until we get his Dad in Azkaban.”

Sirius nodded and James grimly accepted reality, as much as it displeased him.

Aurora retraced her words. It had taken twenty two years, but a backbone was emerging, painfully breaking through years of buccaneering recklessness and convenient cynicism. Resilience had swelled up in her. Instead of crying, or breaking down like she had in the weeks before, the revelations from Top Hat’s pocket were a release. It gave her a true sense of purpose. This was not her war; but they had killed her brother and brought her into it. By anyone’s reckoning she was going to play her part in it.

“You better go now; Top Hat’s mates could be here anytime. The one thing that wasn’t a bluff is that I bet he was a busy man, and frankly I think people in Knockturn Alley will wonder where he went soon.”

James and Sirius duly departed, thanking her. She hadn’t told them that she was on the wanted card, it felt like a piece of her own personal vendetta.

After obliviating Top Hat’s memory, she left the clearing herself. 

Soon on her way back up towards Hogsmeade, she saw Laurie at the top of the hill, taking the steps three at a time, pacing towards her. He was wearing a backpack, and clothes stained with blood.

Fearing the worst she called out “Laurie!” and ran up to greet him. 

He embraced her with a hug.

As her face remained one of concern, he said, almost as an aside, “Don’t worry it’s not my blood.”

“Oh,” said Aurora both relieved and horrified by the revelation, “What happened?”

“Look, sorry I took so long. We need to head to All Saints Church. I will explain everything on the way.”

Laurie then pulled out a flowery dress and coat from his backpack, along with a brown masculine suit. From the side pocket he also removed a glass bottle filled with a grey sludge, and two clips of hair in plastic packets. 

She observed the bottle with a look of suspicion. 

Sensing her discontent, Laurie revealed, “Rory, I made a breakthrough. I know where a Death Eater is. But we’ve both got to drink this, it's Polyjuice Potion.”


	14. A Holy Affair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the help of Polyjuice Potion, Aurora and Laurie are led to some very strange places. All the while, they get closer to uncovering the truth, obtaining a crucial meeting with a Death Eater.

As the soaring melody reached its emotional zenith, Aurora and Laurie watched on, two rows from the back, bunched together on a creaking church pew.

The song was in Ancient Greek. The singing, operatic and ethereal in its expression and performed by children dressed immaculately in velvet-adorned gowns, carried over the ominous reverberations of the organ pipes.

The music detailed a struggle to find solace in God. That was all Aurora could understand. For however beautiful their performance may have been, their diction was less impressive, perhaps out of a realisation that few others clustered in the church had any understanding of classical tongues. They were sacrificing verbal clarity for rapturous harmony. Nonetheless, the tune eventually reached an arresting denouement, with the organ player formerly hunched over the keys now raising her arms histrionically, almost maniacally, as her shadow reflected off the sparing candlelight in the corners of the church. 

The hymn had initially been conceived by an eccentric hermit, before it was polished and resuscitated into popular consciousness by a cobweb of Catholic intellectuals. It was meant to render the divinity of the almighty in worthy souls, whilst cowering the damned that had every reason to fear their mortality.

It was a suitable accompaniment to a day that had already involved ghosts, duels and usury. 

When the music reached a gentle addendum, there was applause as the dozen or so gathered in the stalls greeted their efforts with brazen enthusiasm. Then, the composition stopped all together, the choir master bowing to signify the closure of play. Meanwhile, a disenchanted caretaker muttered his way past Aurora and Laurie, blaspheming as he swept snow-ridden leaves from the aisles with a coarsely-bristled broom. He was cursing under his breath about the constant closing and opening of the double doors at the back, which had teased the afternoon draft into the welcoming warmth of the hall.

Aurora and Laurie weren’t there just to enjoy the classical arrangements, however.

Laurie had greeted Aurora in Hogsmeade late, blood-smeared and flustered. Now he had thrown Aurora into a roll-of-the-dice operation that required the precision of a Swiss watch in its construction, but the riskiness of tangoing with a Manticore in its expression. 

In many respects, the choirboys were the perfect metaphor for the daring and delicacy required in their plans. The only difference was Aurora hadn’t been blessed with a rehearsal. 

She was unable to glean from Laurie’s hurried demeanour and alert mind why he had been held up, why he had been covered in “someone else’s” blood, or even how he had found out any of the information that he knew. Frankly, she had every inclination to hurl a bat bogey hex at him and dump his schemes on his arse.

Responding to her protestations, he promised he had found the way to a Death Eater. If they followed his plan to the letter, they would learn all they needed to know. Aurora had forgotten this controlling aspect to his nature, and she loathed being reactive and second-fiddle to another’s orders. It put her at a difficult disadvantage. It was her judgement call, however, on whether to trust him. 

In the end she realised that she had to. 

There would be opportunities to question him later about the inconsistencies. Time would be there to piece the erratically constructed jigsaw together. If Laurie was on the right track in the here and now though, this was their one shot. 

So, fighting off the trepidations over Laurie’s reliability, and the potential reality of what the next hour could have in store, she sat on the bench, now thirty years old and with auburn hair in a plat. The Polyjuice Potion had taken affect almost instantaneously. Aurora, never having tasted it before, spat out the first gulp onto her coat, and was forced to then drink it again second-hand, by licking it off her lapel. Though that hardly changed the look or taste, which remained vile, with a hint of sweetness that Laurie’s apparently lacked.

Laurie wore a brown suit, complete with a garish yellow tie and white shirt, and shoes polished so clean they reflected the light like a magnifying glass. He had shrunk several inches, gained about twenty pounds in muscle, and had closely-cropped white blonde hair which gave him an unusual swagger. His name was now Lionel Hughes, from the Department of Defence, with his anxious wife, Lucy Hughes, a budding wizarding florist. 

The choir performed an encore, before the small troop of spectators went to the stage and greeted the boys themselves. Aurora realised that for the most part, they were mothers or fathers of the children in attendance. As the proud parents milled around at the front, she heard a few murmur, “Good job”. One even rambunctiously pronounced for all to hear, “You’re going to nail that concert next week if you keep sounding like that!” 

Aurora and Laurie weren’t out of place however. A couple had come merely for the performance. They stayed for a few minutes before taking their shopping bags and leaving, one murmuring to the other one, “See, I told you they were good!” 

In addition, a solitary bald chap sat in the eastern wing. He was lingering in the church for familiarity sake, and had spent the entire rehearsal flicking through a travel guide to the Lebanon. He was still reading it now, upping sticks in the church for the long haul.

Laurie turned to Aurora, olive-scent still permeable despite the alterations of the transformative broth, and said, “Five minutes.”

“Five minutes until what?” whispered Aurora.

“Showtime,” he said, with a wink.

Despite herself, Aurora had to stifle a laugh at this callous quip.

She then ferried her hands through the flowery dress and effeminate coat she was wearing. Laurie hadn’t been able to provide her with Lucy’s wand, though the clothes, a far softer variety than the kind Aurora wore herself made her uncomfortable enough already. Aurora took out a small lipstick case and mirror, applying the red colouring for her flesh for the first time since her teens. Her reflection was alien to her, and it was hard not to react like a cat stumbling across its face in a rain puddle. She examined her tight angular cheeks, her securely tied-back hair, and the icy sheen that now coloured her skin. Giving the features a clean with a wet wipe, she tried to remain as dispassionate as possible. She scrubbed a stranger’s features in the same way she might add finishing touches to an art project, or how she used to dab old ruins with a brush, with a level of precise detachment.

Whatever the case, Aurora found it difficult to inhabit any sort of distinct personality for the upcoming charade. Laurie had told her enough about what was coming up for her to understand that the crucial factor was to keep her wand not far from her grasp. 

The church then cleared. The parents and boys filed out as one, still maintaining their vigorous enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the organist promptly packed her things into a duffel bag and followed them to the emerging haze of wintry darkness. Night had been descending increasingly early with each day that passed. 

Only the bibliophile remained, engrossed in his book, turning each page with pronounced rustling, despite the departing caretaker’s tuts of disapproval. 

They waited, Laurie at ease with the adjourning pause, until from the corner of Aurora’s eye, the sanctuary door across from the chancel opened. 

A small boy appeared, diminutive in size, even for his age, poking his head around the handle. Wearing a gown, with sleek brown hair, Aurora realised he was one of the children that had performed at rehearsal. This time, however, his hair was tied in a tight bun at the back, and his facial features seemed to have altered. His cheeks also appeared somewhat sallow, his forehead a little more pronounced, and his eyes now glowed with an arresting orange tint.

“Time to get into character,” murmured Laurie.

Somewhat apprehensive, Aurora nodded, biting her nail.

His shoes, concealed under his swaying robe, clacked against the floor. He walked along the aisle, turning left, following it around, and keeping his pace steady, until he came to Laurie and Aurora’s pew. 

There he paused, and looked up at Aurora and Laurie, who were staring straight on, their focus on the altar at the front, their expressions taciturn.

“Mr Hughes?” the boy asked. His voice was unusually high. It sounded like that of a small infant, words coming as naturally to him as a baby fumbling their first words.

“Yes,” said Laurie, eyebrow raised.

“If you would both come with me please?” he said, turning from them sharply and walking to the south end of the church.

Aurora hesitated. Without pausing the boy said, “Oh that’s just Arnold up there, reading. He is here only for the solitude.”

She gave a tentative glance in the direction of Arnold, he was still reading his book, but now had the pages turned upside down. Another reason for her hesitation was the unusual feeling of possessing someone else’s body. Their stride pattern was different to hers. She found it uncomfortable stepping forward with her right foot first, even if her body now gave an inclination for it. She also felt her knees, which were lighter and smaller, gave her an unusual flexibility, at the cost of some of the muscle she had built from being battered in caves. Following the boy had become an unorthodox effort for her. 

With surprising panache, the boy opened a heavy iron-bolted door near the pulpit, and gestured for them to trail him in. After ascending several flights of stairs, the boy waited by a second door, unnervingly composed whilst Aurora and Laurie heaved out their chests, the strain of the steep steps winding them somewhat. The door was unmarked, and made of delicate wood, complimented with a silvery handle. 

The boy gave it a sharp knock.

Without a second’s hesitation, it swung inward. 

With a nod, the boy vanished from view, de-materialising on the spot.

Maybe he is just a little shy, noted Aurora, her internal voice deadpan.

Aurora and Laurie stepped across the doorframe, and entered a small office, circular in design and composed of gothic stone walls, continuing the pattern set in the church below. Stained glass windows of a non-decorative nature, all consisting of a drab murky green design, brought in copious light. Aside from that, only a writing bureau and a bookrest holding several scrolls furnished the room.

A tall man of slender build turned from his desk and rose to his feet. His face was contoured and narrow, his nose tapered to a sharp point, with eyes that were bloodshot red. He made no effort to hide his looks behind a deception. Clearly, he had been expecting them.

“Mr Hughes,” he said, with patting Laurie on the shoulder.

Returning the favour, Laurie replied, “Father Francis.”

Aurora knew that staying mum was the only route she could take with this pretence.

“This must be your lovely wife,” Father Francis said.

He bowed at her accordingly. The beads and cross around his neck jangled against his robes as he arched his neck.

“Oh,” he then said, exposing his fangs, “You didn’t actually believe that nonsense about crosses. It is all just superstition.”

“Didn’t think I’d hear a priest call a cross a superstition,” observed Aurora stiffly.

“You also never thought one of our kind would wear one,” said Father Francis cackling.

“So,” said Laurie abruptly, “let’s get down to business shall we? I was told to come here for the meeting.”

“You’re bringing her along to that?” said Father Francis, his voice turning to an incredulous sneer halfway through.

“How I conduct my business affairs,” replied Laurie sharply, “is no concern of yours.”

The priests lips began to curl and he queried forensically, “You didn’t take her to any of the other meetings, why now?”

“Her has a name, you know,” said Aurora, changing her mind and deciding the best avenue through this was to be indignant and gobby. 

“Recent matters have demanded I am more careful over how I do business,” answered Laurie.

“Is this after your friends chickened out of the trade for the fire salts, right after you green-lighted them on the sly? Oh, your bosses at the Ministry will be ever so pleased if this backfires,” pondered Father Francis smugly.

Laurie paused for a moment before coolly stating, lips barely moving as he spoke, “The risk for me is relatively low. Though unless you want me to whistle blow on your little syndicate and the whole nocturnal creature pact you have going on, I would keep your chatter to a minimum. You might have friends at the Ministry, but if I let slip to the right people that there is one of you lot hiding out in a Muggle church and fencing black market goods to Death Eaters, you would have no end of trouble. Not to mention your little hook up to the currently illegal Floo Network. Barty Crouch would find this all very amusing.”

Aurora did her best to hide her confusion, having to firmly furrow her eyebrows so that they wouldn’t rise to the top of her forehead, exposing her flabbergasted bewilderment. Either Laurie was spectacularly blagging his way through the obstacle in front of them, or he possessed a disturbing awareness of the shadows operating behind the scenes at Ministry. 

Gritting his teeth, and pulling at his lips with his fangs, Father Francis said, “Very well, Hughes. Though if I were you I’d remember, the night is darkest before the dawn.”

He clicked his fingers and called, “Boy”.

The servant materialised in the office, standing in between Father Francis and Laurie. 

Father Francis said, “Take them to crypt.”

Rubbing his hand against his face, the main tells of his kind dissolved from his face, his nose smoothening and the colour of eyes dulled until they reached a hazel shade. 

“I now have a sermon starting in an hour I need to prepare for, the evening session here at All Saints Church,” he announced, in a hitherto unheard Edinburgh brogue, “Need anything and I will be in the sanctuary.”

Then, like sands burnt under a naked flame, his body slowly unformed in front of them, leaving clear air where he stood. 

“If you’d come with me please,” said the boy, his expression notably impassive over the whole affair.

Laurie and Aurora followed him out of the church. 

Father Francis was an unorthodox contradiction in Aurora’s mind. He was creature of the night in the guise of a religious preacher, who did dodgy deals with corrupt Ministry officials such as Mr Hughes. This made him a morally dubious figure, though not one beyond usual villainy. For all she knew, he could have simply been taking charge of an opportunity.

The excuse everyone was using these days, reasoned Aurora.

For all she knew, he could have been preying on the visiting children and selling goods directly to Death Eaters. Even if it was more likely that he was merely a fence, in the same way the medicine salesman had been. Either way Aurora didn’t like him. He was one of the many who took the chance to thrive in the murkier equilibrium of a wizarding society on the brink of full scale war. There was plenty for him to answer for. 

The boy led them to the graveyard at the rear of the grounds. All Saints Church rested on the edges of Falkirk, in a muggle hamlet called Brother’s Keep. Dwelling in a valley, with snowy knolls circling the landscape, it gave Aurora the impression they were almost standing in a bowl. The mounds stretched as far as the eye could see and only a motorway managed to pierce the landscape. Aurora scanned a bank of snow in the distance, knowing that was where they had dropped off their own clothes. Laurie had also told her there; in one of his few moments of explanation, that Mr Hughes lived in Hogsmeade. Arriving from the all-wizard village to here was a fundamental part of the deception. When she asked where he had come from before Hogsmeade however, he had been less forthcoming.

The boy happily marched through the wildflowers protruding from patches of snow, stamping out these fleeting traces of life with his shoes. Eventually they reached a solitary tombstone. It was constructed of mildew-ridden stone, and was unmarked like the door to Father Francis’ office. The exception was a silver jewel in the middle, hammered in flat so it blended with the grave and deterred grave vandals.

The boy prodded the silver stone with his finger and the burial landmark opened up with a scrape, the stone splitting in half and pushing across the grass, scooping up snow like a shovel. It revealed a winding staircase. 

She expected to discover a crypt that was harsh, austere and unwelcoming. Instead she found herself in something resembling a visiting lobby at a guesthouse. Though the room was bare, and the floor was made of flattened mud, it was all well-treated. There was a fireplace at the far end and a curtain to one side, probably concealing the main quarters and the more gruesome elements of living underground as bloodsucking member of the undead. That may have influenced the use of incense, resting on a solitary table by the stairs. Its fumes were of an indescribably pleasant aroma. The scent was one that pleasured her, but for whatever reason, she couldn’t list its characteristics. With the fireplace being used for commerce, this was possibly an unorthodox attempt to content any customers stopping by. 

The boy, unaffected by the incense, turned to her and said, “Unicorn horn: gold and from a foal, cut into granules. When burnt under a green flame, they release echoes of the favourite memories of anyone inhaling their fumes - as long as they’re mortal.”

Aurora let out a cough; the thought of severed horns from baby unicorns certainly altered her position on the matter.

The boy, perhaps used to seeing their business charmer receive a mixed reception whenever it was discussed in much detail, paid no attention to her reaction. He went over to the fire place picked up a common garden pot, and taking out two handfuls of black soot, he handed them to Laurie and Aurora.

He directed his instruction at Laurie, “Step into the fireplace, drop the powder and say ‘The Shrieking Shack’. It’s where the meeting is happening today.”

The businessman nature of the conversation, emanating from a young child with a voice as innocent as a spring-time daffodil, made Aurora feel unhealthily apprehensive.

Obliging the boy’s words, Laurie duly stepped into the hearth. Within seconds he was engulfed in hypnotic flame. Aurora immediately followed suit, remembering the discomforting sense of being yanked backwards by her ears as she shot towards her destination. 

She tumbled to the ground, coughing somewhat as Laurie helped her to her feet. 

Aurora studied the room, observing every detail, aware that any hints or clues could be vital. They were in a basement, which had several beams running across the sealing and wooden floorboards that festered an unhealthy assortment of damp. Several heavy boxes, simply labelled as “Stock” rested against some of the pillars going from ceiling to floor, whilst the rest of the room was bare and unextraordinary. The exception was a chubby man, wearing a velure coat and starry hat, who was dusting the ash off of his wacky garments by the foot of the basement stairs.

“Hughes!” he said, beaming at them. His voice was plummy and every time it became excitable his belly would jiggle.

“Alright Ballymore,” said Laurie, “how is it going?”

“All good, yeah matey,” he said, adjusting his hat. “Commerce is still working wonders for me in Knockturn Alley.”

“It’s weird to be doing all this here,” replied Laurie.

“Oh, well, it is only for a week hopefully. Basically since Crouch busted our stash in Elephant and Castle, we’ve moved it here for the moment, focusing more of our trade on Hogsmeade for time being.”

“Isn’t this place supposed to be haunted?” asked Aurora.

He turned on his feet and took in Aurora’s presence for the first time. He gave out a little camp clap of glee.

Planting her with a hug, he said, “Oh you must be Hughes’ wife? I take it you warmed to the much-discussed business proposal. Hughes had no idea how he was going to convince you, I reckon he thought he’d have to do it on the sly.”

He let out a rough chuckle that contrasted with his bouncy turns of expression.

“Well as for the haunting,” he continued, “the place has a host of torn up furniture upstairs, in fact most the wallswere mangled and bitten. But we checked and there are no ghosts, spirits or anything of the like, I reckon it must be some dog-traders who come here every now and then.”

Aurora took an element of pleasure from this revelation. Frankly, she’d have enough trouble from ghosts that morning. Her nightmare still dwindled in her mind, even after the events of the day. What became apparent though was that if they were in the Shrieking Shack, then the criminals of the world had become exceptionally ballsy. With the forest clearing and this, they now had two hideouts very close to Hogwarts itself. There was no way they could have achieved that without inside help. 

“Dogs?” asked Laurie.

“Yeah bite marks and fur all over the place upstairs. Also it’s a good boon that no one in the village wants to go near here. It makes it a decent temporary stop for our affairs until better premises arrive. We’ve been here for a week already and so far, no monsters!”

Ballymore indulged a little giggle before saying, “Though if you look at that boarded up space there,” pointing at an archway nailed shut with thick boards in the western side of the basement, “we had to shut it off. It was a passageway, but my idiot workers were too superstitious to stay here unless we shut it. They thought it was a ghost path or something. It’s a shame as I’d have liked to have seen where it went. Oh, I digress. Anyway the meeting’s upstairs.”

They followed him out of the basement. 

On the floor above was a generously sized room, with an open plan kitchen and living room dominating the space. There were stairs directly above leading to an upper corridor of rooms, but for a shack it looked rather impressive. The ceiling was two floors above them, but visible frm where they, the ceiling beams across the wall visible to the naked eye. In many ways it felt as impressive as the structuring of the church, though grislier and with a sense of rotting. 

However impressively designed the room may have been, with its large windows and old furniture complimenting the great lofty impressions of the room, it was filthy. Mud-stained the floorboards, a smell of urine and mustiness plagued every breath they took and more disturbingly crockery and furniture had been ripped apart. Paws prints could be seen littering the area, and hunks of the wall had been bitten out, and a pyramid of broken wooden chairs remained in a pill, with clear scratch marks on the underside. There were other additions of furniture, such as wardrobes and tables, and they also portrayed an unusual amount of strain and wear. 

Ballymore took it in his stride, whilst Aurora gaped open mouthed. 

“Father Francis didn’t give you any trouble, did he?” asked Ballymore.

“Not really,” replied Laurie.

“Good,” said Ballymore, “frankly his disgusting kind will come to an end soon with our hands on a stake, and we’ll all be happier.”

He said this with a nihilistic relish that ran roughshod over his genial manner.

Before Aurora went any further, Laurie whispered in her ear, "Listen, eventually at the meeting we will be found out. I don't know when or how, but the signal to start firing will be pretty obvious."

They then turned to the four armchairs, following Ballymore. The chairs were gathered in a D shape around a solitary throne. Laurie approached a timid man, whom sedentary and quaking greeted Hughes with a bumbling apprehension.

“Alright Hughes?” said the mouse-haired man hesitantly.

“Smithy,” replied Laurie, shaking his limp hand, “how is it doing?”

“All good,” he replied, then adding after a pause, his voice trembling, “Say you don’t know where Top Hat went do you?”

“Nah, can’t say I have seen him,” said Laurie, butterflies filled Aurora’s stomach at the mention of his name.

Laurie and Aurora reclined into two of the armchairs as Smithy then said peevishly, “Anyway, I am filling in for him now, bit of a last minute thing though.”

“Fair enough,” said Laurie, reclining in his chair with a boorish yawn, “just bring it up with boss when he arrives.”

Aurora was astounded at the slick nature of Laurie’s words, how he had known all their names and captured the grasp of the social dynamic was a matter that made Aurora very suspicious. As she determined earlier, he was either he was blagging, or his contacts weren’t the sort she wanted to invite home for tea.

They then all went to sit in their chairs, joing Smithy in front of the throne. Laurie, Smithy and Ballymore prattled on about various mundane aspects of business, until the fireplace in the basement below burst into life, hot air fanning out through the must. 

They stopped talked immediately, and waited as someone made their way up the stairs with slow, deliberate steps. As he emerged from the top of the staircase, Aurora noticed it was Rosier, whom she'd seen in Borgin and Burke’s. He was wearing fine, dark clothes, and his black spiky hair had been thickened with product. It was quite some appearance. 

Clearly he hadn’t told them his real name, she imagined they just called him “boss” or some sort of placeholder phrase that he chose to use. 

To hammer home this musing, as he strode towards the armchairs they all stood up as one, bowing their heads deferentially. Aurora had begun to understand that rather than a loose rabble, this was streamlined and harsh system of business, with a clear hierarchy present. 

“Right gentlemen,” he said, reclining in his throne. Aurora realised his monosyllabic tendencies with Lucius were a part of a deception, as now he tenderly spoke every word as if in love with the sound of his own voice.

He continued jovially, “Do sit down. Bad news first, Gorgeous George couldn’t make it today, though I am glad you are all happy with the deal we made. Cheers Hughes and Ballymore for helping to broker it.”

They nodded their thanks to Rosier, as he moved on the conversation.

“Now, Smithy,” he said, ruffling his hand through his spiky hair, “I take it you’re filling in for Top Hat? No idea where he is?”

“None at all,” said Smithy, shaking his wobbly chin.

Rosier’s merrier guise darkened as he said, “Well, we’ll sort it out later.”

Then with a clap of his hands, he reverted back to his business brio.

“So, before all the ghosts take us,” he started, acknowledging their sycophantic laughs, “let’s start business. First issue at hand is Hughes’ proposal for using the florist as an outpost. I take it you are Mrs Hughes? I also take it that’s the reason you are here?”

Laurie turned to Aurora, and she, looking at Rosier, who surveyed her from his seat with cool, dead eyes, nodded in response.

“And you approve of this?” he inquired.

Aurora nodded.

“Can I hear you speak?” Rosier then asked.

“What do you want to know?” said Aurora, a little too quickly. Laurie had one hand on his wand, worried things had started to turn south too soon.

“What I want to know, Mrs Hughes” he asked, scratching his chin, “is do you remember Andrea Larkin?”

“Oh yes, lovely lady,” said Aurora, bluffing and hoping it was the right answer.

“She is a very important friend of ours at the Prophet. That’s for sure. “

“Oh yes. What has she got to do with this?”

“Well you remember, I imagine, Mrs Hughes, how she came round last week and did a lovely little piece on your floral arrangements?”

“Oh yes, of course.”

Aurora had no idea why she kept saying, ‘Oh yes’ almost like a panicked tic.

“You see, without offence meant, we always do a check on spots we are going to leave goods in, or place where we intend to hide from the Ministry. Truthfully, the whole story Larkin wrote was a ruse so she could audit its suitability. It was your husband’s request. He had no idea how he’d break the news to you on his plans for an earner. Hughes said you weren’t our sort, and that he may have to convince you. Your attitude has changed remarkably quickly.”

“Well, my husband’s logic is convincing.”

“So convincing it turned a buttercup into a bed of thorns?”

“Yes.”

“I have a draft copy of the article here, even has a photograph of you with the flowers,” announced Rosier.

“Ta-da,” he said, unfolding it from his chest pocket, dropping the article on her lap.

Aurora picked up the page. The prose was minimal. At the front and centre however was a glowing, colourful picture. It portrayed a beautiful bouquet of orchids, blowing in a gentle breeze, carried by a woman with golden blonde hair and her raspberry lips curved into a beaming smile. A sinking feeling was felt in the pit of her stomach, as she looked at the picture and then at Rosier’s face, which had condescendingly taken the form of a disappointed parent, his features utterly impassive.

Whoever Aurora was, she wasn’t Mrs Hughes. She had consumed the wrong hairs in the Polyjuice Potion. 

“Shit,” cursed Laurie, under his breath, bemoaning his misstep. 

“Unless Hughes here has been engaging in casual bigamy,” declared Rosier, “I’d say that isn’t you.”

Ballymore let out a gasp, and Smith lurched back in his chair, eyebrows raised in shock.

“Oh, Hughes really,” said Rosier, with a derisive hoot in his voice. “With Top Hat missing and with Father Francis tipping me off that you brought your ‘wife’, I knew something was up. Not even you could have coninced her so quickly. I have no idea if this is some madcap scheme of yours, or if someone else altogether is hiding under that mask of flesh. But this stops now.”

Rosier let out a chuckle and clambered out of his seat, whilst his two business acquaintances, Ballymore and Smith looked on in stunned silence. 

“It was a good effort though. The thing is,” purred Rosier, “I don’t know what normally lurks in here, whether it is a big dog, or something stranger. Though I can see a phantom, I can always see the dark shadows, where the traitors and deceivers lurk.”

He turned around and called down the basement stairs, “You can come out now!”

At his beckon and call, the thudding procession of footsteps could be heard from the the floor below. Emerging onto the first floor were six wizards and two witches, all garbed identically in black. Their appearances and heights varied, and Aurora didn’t care to analyse them, clearly they weren’t here for the company, they were menacing targets to take down. The only thing Aurora cared to notice was that alongside their matching uniforms, they all expressed the same triumphant sneer on their faces. 

As one they formed a long horizontal line behind Rosier, wands out at the ready. 

“Compliments of our new deal with Gorgeous George,” he beamed. “As many snatchers as we so wish to fight with. Well, I picked the best; they should pose enough of a challenge to you.”

Laurie shook his head in disapproval.

“You didn’t bring any Death Eater buddies to the match,” said Laurie, “how disappointing.”

“I wouldn’t want that over-promoted Lucius Malfoy to come swanning here and taking my glory,” replied Rosier bitterly.

He continued, “Besides don’t flatter yourselves, you think you’re a big enough fish for that? No, your arses are mine. I have no idea what you were planning Hughes, or whoever you actually are, but there is nowhere to run. An anti-Apparition jinx is place. You came for a fight clearly. So, now you have one.”

The two other dealers in the room looked on flabbergasted. Clearly they weren’t aware either about Hughes’ true nature, or the twist that had been planned by Rosier. Their eyes darted from Hughes to the thugs standing behind Rosier, looking incredulous. Aurora realised now that Rosier wasn’t just a brute with business acumen, he was a scheming individual with an intelligence that contradicted his slavish devotion to Voldemort. He was going to present quite a challenge. 

Laurie turned to Aurora and whispered in her ear, “Let’s do this shall we?”


	15. Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holed up in the Shrieking Shack, Aurora and Laurie find themselves in combat with a Death Eater.

Aurora drew her wand.

With her fingers caressing the handle, a raw expression of power tingled through her veins as she fired at Ballymore and Smith, both lounging in their chairs open-mouthed. Mordantly nonplussed by the chaotic genesis of conflict, they were struck down by red light.

Aurora then twirled the maple wand across her hand and shot a stinging hex at Rosier. He was still in front of Laurie, only feet away from her. To her surprise, however, he managed to deflect her third spell seemingly with time to spare.

Rosier was no fool, he had ended their ruse more abruptly than they would have liked. Frankly Aurora bemoaned her surprise at this reality. After all he was in the inner-circle of Voldemort's ragtag gang of devoted followers. He possessed immense power.

Sensing the need to take cover, Aurora put a hand on both armrests of her chair, and flipped over backwards, cushioning her fall to the floor with her knees. Her move was executed just in time as Rosier fired a retaliatory effort that singed the spot she had just been sitting in.

Smoke was rising from the fabric of the cushion.

Laurie, whom had imitated her movements to the letter, was now crouched behind his own seat.

Revelling in the initiation of conflict and licking his lips in delight, he turned to her and said, “I will take out Rosier, you deal with his goons!”

He gestured to the eight of them, who had organised themselves into a defensive position behind Rosier, firing a cavalcade of spells in Aurora's direction.

Blocking them with a cry of “Protego”, and wincing as her shoulder vibrated from the effort, she said to Laurie, “That’s hardly fair!” 

“Just trust me,” he replied, craning his neck back and letting out a raucous drain of a laugh. 

Aurora fired a counter-attack for cover, but merely heard her spells deflect with a hollow din off of the henchmen’s shield charms. There were eight of them, the odds looked impossible. She knew that if this went by warfare convention, she'd lose.

They had to keep the fight as unorthodox as possible, thought Aurora.

Not sure how to communicate this over the din as they deflected another volley of spells with their shield charms, she staggered back in shock as Laurie leant over his armchair and threw a hex at Rosier.

He had exposed his body to their magic, red meat before a carnivorous den, madness in Aurora's view. His spell, however, was so fast and his movement so precise that he merely registered as a blur of colour. It crackled from the tip, dictated by a slashing movement that Aurora hadn’t seen before. 

A sharp cut appeared on Rosier’s cheek, tearing through the skin in a diagonal line like a knife cutting through a canvas. Rosier roared, provoked like a territorial hippo. 

He yelled over to his followers, his voice more of a rasp than before, “You lot take out the girl, this bastard is mine.”

He fired a fizzing yellow curse at Laurie. Before Aurora could come to his aid, he rolled from his cover with a nonchalant salute of farewell, his overriding emotion appearing to be nothing short of euphoria, and skipped off to the left by the stairs.

The eight let him be and Rosier instead pursued Laurie's form across the living room. Within a few moments, they were both at the other end of the room, their motions a blur, punctuated by the swift expression of their spellcraft. Their lips remained firmly shut in a game of ardent, trenchant mental conflict as they deflected each other’s efforts. Mesmeric colours: amber, green, yellow and pink radiated through the shack from the collisions of their various curses. The room became tinged in an intoxicating haze of purples and blues as their spells escalated into a more heated and aggressive nature. Aurora watched as they were swept up the stairs by their brutal embrace, the duel continuing on a landing above.

Still sitting behind her armchair, she turned to the eight thugs in front of her. In their arrogance they had paused from the fray, observing Laurie and Rosier's initiation of battle with a hint of disappointment that it had disappeared from view. Aurora realised that they didn't consider her much of an obstacle. She was just "the girl" and they had probably more fear of the alleged ghost haunting the house than they did of her.

This infuriated Aurora more than any possibility of being killed. She refused to be a footnote, a dispensed toy or a first paycheck from Gorgeous George that would probably be heightened once the Polyjuice Potion wore off.

If she was to meet her maker here, she wanted to be dragged to hell kicking and screaming, gnawing at the arms of the devil that would drop her into the fiery abyss - probably for abandoning Rupert.

After a pause, the eight leapt from their covers. Their bodies appeared from behind sofas, the banister to the basement stairs, and even from behind a ripped curtain. They were like a horde of emerging blood sucking bats finding their prey scrambling in their dark of their cave, a long way from home.

She ducked, and their spells hit the far wall, plaster repelling from the brickwork and diffusing through the room - a symposium of dust that dried her tongue and coated her hair. 

Aurora knew she needed to use her brain, as her abilities alone wouldn't push her through this obstacle. Bemoaning her racing heart, and instead wishing for a quick-thinking mind, she fired another set of stunning spells, a volley of attack they deflected into the ceiling high above.

After repealing her magic, they leapt from their covers again, this time aiming at the arm chair she was crouched behind.

Sensing they were about to blast her cover to kingdom come, she cried, “Impedimenta”.

Aurora observed their variation of jinxes and hexes decrease in speed until they were moving at only a snail’s pace in her direction. Then with a jabbing motion, she pushed the motley array of lights back at them, accelerating the pace of their spells so that they were forced to cower for safety. She heard two of them gasp, hurling themselves on the floor.

It was a satisfying effort, but it hadn’t really resulted in any progress. Hopefully, she reckoned, it may have worked at unsettling them. 

Laurie and Rosier’s duel upstairs, meanwhile, was clearly becoming more heated. It was now dictated by bellows and shouts. Their raw throated calls from above eked through the floorboards and caused another brief ceasefire, as the eight in front of her cockily listened in on the conflict. Aurora wanted to bemoan them for their continued arrogance, but truthfully she spent those seconds doing her best to get her breath back. The fight even in these phoney stages, had been more exhausting than anything she had come up against before.

She turned to look at the basement, thinking of some way to gain an advantage with the staircase. The eight snatchers meanwhile, continued to complacently listen in on the chaos upstairs. As she mulled over her choices, she felt a gentle breeze brush through the shack, picking up dust which swirled to the roof in a melancholic wind. Aurora had decided on her next course of action. She was going to make for the basement. Wiping the sweat off her brow, and with her wand clutched firmly in hand, she crouched, ready to run.

Her plans, however, were interrupted by the quicker thinking across the room.

“Cover for me!” cried two of them. 

Then, a pair of bald identical-looking men, probably twins, threw themselves over a hunk of gouged cavity wall that had been resting on the floor, and ran at the armchair with their wands aloft. Aurora leaned over the armchair, ready to fire a stunning shot, but was forced back to the ground as a deluge of spells, fizzing and snarling through the musty atmosphere came her way. There was too much heat to take down, and now the bald aggressors opened fire themselves, missing her ear by a whisker. As desperate fatalism consumed Aurora's thinking, contemplating whether they'd accept a surrender, a giddy, teasing brainwave catalysed her willpower, eroding her disenchantment and revitalising her determination. She had come all this way, and she was not going to give up now.

Aurora pulled out the lipstick mirror from her coat, thanking the assumed femininity of her role, and prodded it with her wand. Turning away from the two advancing men, but holding her mirror in the air, she said, “Lumos”.

The glowing tip of her wand lit up against the mirror. A precise ray of yellow shone off the reflective surface, creating a sharp focused line of hot light that penetrated the eyes of the two aggressors whom, clutching their cheeks, fell to the ground in a gasp, writhing on the floor, kicking at the air like fish taken from the ocean seabed, startled by the loss of their vision.

Aurora then thrust her shoulders over the armchair and cried “Impedimenta” again.

As the spells of the six others ground to a halt mid-air, she pointed her wand at the two temporarily blinded men rolling on the floor. She promptly stunned them before throwing herself back behind the armchair, grazing her elbow as scraped the floorboards. The stalled spells regained their pace and hit the back wall. 

Two down six to go, thought Aurora blissfully.

Her satisfaction was abated within seconds however as a man, long haired and broad shouldered, shouted an incantation across the room. It sounded Eastern European in its phrasing.

An ominous swirling vortex of purple zoned in on the armchair. Sensing the danger, she dragged herself to the left, her stomach grinding against the floor. Her armchair, meanwhile, was blown to smithereens.

A graceful shower of fluffy sofa cushion soared into the sky, ascending like poetic leave-fall caught in an autumn updraft, catching in her hair on the way down and marinating within the exposed wall plaster. Not taking stock of such idle beauty and more concerned at the devastation the spell caused, she bit her lip in frustration, feeling her canine pierce flesh as she dragged herself by the arms across the room.

She closed her eyes so that the light of their curses, which were missing by her inches, didn't obstruct her vision.

There was a delay in her realisation, at first she had thought perhaps a sneakoscope somewhere had gone off, but a ringing sensation was permeating her ears, caused by the aftershock of the explosion. It wreaking havoc with her hearing. As distracting as the resonation was, she continued to scramble across the floor, and did all she could to reach the staircase behind the armchairs. When she was forced to dodge a killing curse, fired with intent from only fifteen feet away, she realised it was too far to go. In desperation, with all six firing at her now, no longer indulging her with complacency, she settled for getting behind the kitchen counter.

With the adrenalin playing the tune to her movements, her clawing hands had absorbed shards of wood that had splintered into her fingertips as she clawed like a cat to the kitchen sides. Her heartbeat had risen considerably to the point it formed a virulent harmony with the pounding in her ears. Blood dribbled down her noise and a section of sofa had grazed her forehead on impact.

To her relief she reached the tiled flooring of the kitchen area otherwise unscathed, and with an unfortunate smile she pulled herself up behind the counter, relieved to miss the calvacade of magic directed her way. Until that was, an unidentified spell caught her in the hip, pronounced in an Easter European accent once again. It burnt through her dress, and corroded her skin, forming a black hole in her side. 

Aurora screamed in agony and clutched her waist, writhing on the floor in disbelief at the spell's intensity. The pain was relentless, not satsfied with causing an impact wound, an orange acid had buried itself in her skin tearing and burning through tissue, smoke emoting from her side. Praying that the pain would subside before they could all corner her, she continued to roll on the ground doing her best not to sob. It was an odd sensation; seeing a body that didn’t truly belong to her suffer such a wound, though it didn't stop it from hurting like unforgiving hell. When the potion wore off, it would be another wicked scar for her beaten body. 

I’ve got to get through this, she reasoned.

There was nothing noble in death.

Putting her own personal foibles such as agonising pain to one side, and thinking really only of her brother, she wiped the blood from her nose and gave her hip a quick glance over. The searing acid had seeped through several further layers of her flesh, exposing soft tissue underneath, whilst continuing to fizz and tease the edges of wound, stretching it and blackening the skin.

Rubbing the sore spot to no avail, she propped herself back into a crouching position. Laurie and Rosier’s duel continued undiminished above her, with the sounds of cracked floorboards and toppled furniture audible above her head, intelligible even with the troubles of her ears. She then glanced at the six remaining thugs, whom had been firing spells largely at the wall whilst she writhed on the floor.

Clearly they were unsure whether to charge at her after shehad so easily dismissed them earlier. Now they were scattered all over the room, not taking a defensive bank but fighting as individuals, probably motivated by the massage of a generous bounty waiting for them. 

One, female and raven haired, was hiding behind a rotting table. Aurora fired a spell in her direction which she duly blocked. Though, to her disadvantage, Aurora saw the witch was crouched directly below a beam in the ceiling above. 

“Reducto,” Aurora said, pointing at it, severing off a yard of wood. It fell to the ground, missing her target by inches. The tremors, however, caused the raven-haired witch to stumble, and expose her body to Aurora’s wand. 

Aurora turned to her and said, “Stupefy!”

She fell to the floor, defeated.

Next, a ruby haired witch craned her neck from her position of cover underneath the staircase banister. She conjured a six-foot snake, which leapt towards Aurora, venomous fangs bared.

“Wingardium Leviosa,” Aurora thought, instinctively, using the First Year charm for the first time since her pre-teens. 

Pointing at the isolated hunk of beam, she guided it three feet from the ground and adjusted its angle until it was tilted ninety degrees. Then, making the movement of a rounder’s swing with her wand, she adopted the wood as a makeshift bat. The snake, lunging through the air was promptly beheaded by her punishing stroke with the beam. 

Continuing on from this dizzying success, she hurled the beam across the room, aiming at the witch’s forehead. Unfortunately, the witch fired a vanishing charm and the wood disappeared inches from her face. Benefiting from her body shape being obscured by the spinning block, she quickly fired a retaliatory spell which Aurora had been unable to decipher. 

She felt an invisible rope catch around her ankle, and tighten on impact with her leg, before pulling her limbs with an irresistible pressure. The ruby haired witch smiled as Aurora tried to bat away the curse, finding her counter-charms had minimal effect.

Truthfully she had no idea what the spell was, having missed the mid-seventies at Hogwarts, several cult tricks were anathema to her. Her ankle continue to push upwards, causing her to hop on the spot as she deflected several attacks with a shield charm, until eventually the force came too much and she felt herself tip upside down. Now the aqua metaphors solely applied to her, as she was pulled into the air like a fish reeled in with bait on a hook. Catching her dress to preserve her modesty, she did her best not to panic, succumbing only to hyperventilating as she found herself twelve feet off the floor, dangling by her ankle. The five remaining goons, triumphant in their success, came out from their separate covers and went for a united finishing shot.

Aurora however, in a moment of desperation pointed at the broken assortment of furniture across the landing and made a stabbing motion with her wand.

"Come on, do something!" Aurora screamed, stabbing the air.

With the second prod, she took the sofas, chairs, hunks of armrest, and even torn off segments of wall in with a swish of her wand, and enchanted them to her bidding. At her moment of panicked need, she had accomplished more in transfiguration than she had in the former twenty two years of her life. Unknown to her, she had performed a NEWT level non-verbal spell, turning objects to her will. Operated by her wand, they devotedly threw themselves at her enemies. 

As the ruby haired witch did her best to fight off an errant piece of brickwork that was doing its own best to knock her down, floating in the air, and swinging back and forth like a pendulum, Aurora took advantage of her distracted expression. She was about to vanish the wall, but Aurora turned and, still dangling in the air, one hand on the hem of her dress, with her hip throbbing an orangey glow, fired a series of stunning spells. She missed the first time but hit her chest at the second attempt. Aurora had just enough time to deflect the spells of the four others, whom had obliterated the enchanted furniture. They had opted to shoot it to pieces until the leftovers wobbled on the floor. 

Aurora was still at a disadvantage, dangling upside down, blood starting to rush to her head. She was beginning to feel nauseous. She tried think off every counter-curse she could as she deflected the attacks from below. Even though the spell holding her was rudimentary, she simply had no idea what it was, and still found herself helplessly hooked in the air.

What the bloody hell is this curse, she steamed furiously.

The awkward procession of her deflecting curses whilst upside-down continued until Laurie back into her vision. Their fight had moved back into the main room, each of them announcing their arrival by tumbling together back down the stairs. As they both fought from different vantage points, Laurie spotted Aurora and even with her muffled hearing he could just hear him shout, “Liberacorpus.”

Libera-what? queried Aurora.

She was unable to ponder the matter further as she landed back on the floor, narrowly missing a spell that was fired at her descending abdomen. 

Aurora rolled on impact with the floor, and fired a jelly legs curse, catching one of the four remaining assailants, before finishing him off with a cry of “Flipendo”. A gust of wind threw him against the far end of the shack. 

As one of the others cried out in frustration, she disarmed a man with a white-beard to her right, and turned her attention to Rosier. He was now wearing an ornate mask, and was still vigorously fending off Laurie, whom had retreated to cover in the basement. Rosier was shooting fiery dragons at him down the stairs. Sensing her chance to take him out, now that she had a clean shot, Aurora aimed for his neck looking to finish this early.

The disarmed man, however, was not done, and he charged at her from behind. His heaving breath permeable over the sounds of Laurie and Rosier’s intense spell-craft.

She turned to fire a stunning spell but she was just too slow, and he struck her arm aside, knocking her wand from her grasp. Aurora staggered sideways, looking for her weapon, but before she could locate it, the aggressor pushed her to the floor.

Sensing his ambition for retribution, she bounced back to her feet and aimed a punch, hoping to connect with her ring on his jawline. With speed defying his age, however, he caught her wrist, and then as he aimed a counter attack with his other fist, she caught his. Thus, they stood there, grappling.

Sensing that she’d have to use wandless magic to end the tussle, she said, “Stupefy”. 

The white-bearded man, still clasping her wrists, had closed his eyes expecting the stunning impact. Instead nothing happened, and he looked utterly nonplussed. 

Damnit, she moaned, why does it sometimes do this?

Wandless magic remained a difficult beast for Aurora to tame under pressure. 

She also was put off by the fact that despite his black outfit and fearsome strength, he smelt bizarrely like treacle tart. Clearly he had just come from lunch. 

With a cheery grin, he shrugged and promptly head-butted Aurora. He connected sweetly with her temple. She crumpled to her knees, feeling her head throb from the impact. The edges of his body began to vibrate and drift in her vision. She held back the rising phlegm in her mouth, and did all she could to remain focused. Still holding her wrists, with his sweaty palms discolouring her skin, he hauled her into a standing position and aimed another head-butt which Aurora avoided by fractions. Unable to break his tight hold of her arms, she tried a kick, but her technique was poor and the weak effort collided with his hard calf, jarring her ankle. 

Knowing that this was a struggle she would have to win through less conventional means, she waited for him to attempt a third head-butt. His eyes locked with hers, his seasoned features seemed resigned to an easy victory, and after seeing her futile struggles, he was probably contemplating whether he wished to break her nose with his forehead first.

As he leant in for the knockout blow, Aurora turned her shoulder, knowing that if she got this wrong, he was colliding with her neck, possibly crippling her. Thankfully he collided only with her side as intended. Largely untroubled by the impact, she sank her teeth into his ear, penetrating the cartilage, breaking through the rough texture of his mature skin. The man let out an agonising howl, releasing the pressure on Aurora’s wrists. He clutched his ear with both hands; in the same manner one might hold a conch to their ear at a pineapple-strewn beach, though in this case his expression was one of agony rather than pleasure, even if it was still somewhat vivid. She spat out the loose flesh, and looked down on the fallen man. With his fingers marinated in dense knots of streaming red blood, Aurora tried another wandless spell.

It didn’t work.

Bloody hell, complained Aurora.

With a sigh of disappointment, she knocked him out with her knee instead.

Taking a second to regain composure, and remove the taste of ripened flesh from her tngue, she resolved the healing difficulties with a click of her fingers, thankful the problem was comparatively minor.

There were only two henchmen left. She could see her wand, resting against the wall, ten feet away. Unfortunately, one of Rosier’s men had seen it too.

Before she could move towards it, he approached, his own weapon outstretched.

He said, jubilantly, in his thick Slavic accent, “Don’t move or I will blast your head off. Trust me, any funny business and your face will look like your hip when I am through with you.”

Rosier, misunderstanding the situation and unable to see his friend pointing a wand at Aurora due to a pillar obstructing his view, fired a blasting curse at the ground by Aurora’s feet, thinking he had a clear shot at the target. There was a momentary delay as the foundations creaked, and Aurora locked eyes with the Slavic man, and let out aconfused shrug as the floor fell through. The Slav was still stunned, but Aurora had cottoned on quicker, and as she felt her legs give way she grabbed hold of his lapel.

They tumbled into the basement. She let go of the Slav, who fell away from her with force whilst she tensed her body, preparing herself for the pain of impact.

To her suprise, her fall was cushioned by Laurie instead. Having taken a defensive position in the basement below, he had seen the ceiling behind him begin to cave in, and had caught her in his arms.

He paused for a moment, his arms around Aurora's torso, looking at the twenty foot crater above him and said, “Oh, I knew that was coming. Second time I’ve said your life today.”

Aurora smiled and replied, “Bitch please, I had it covered.”

She then rolled out of Laurie’s grasp, thankful he’d cushioned her fall. Her ears were still in some discomfort, despite the return to hearing, and the dilution provided by the adrenalin of battle had begun to wear off. The chief problem was the burning sensation in her hip, which had a resilience that astounded any attempts she made to clear it.

In a cosmic sense of justice, the man who fell through the floor had let go of his wand too. Her push had disoriented him but he recoevrred with a vigorous shake of the head. Aurora could see both of their wands, thankfully undamaged from the spell. They had fallen in with the floor and were rolling towards the staircase at the far end of the basement. 

“You going to help?” asked Aurora.

“No, you can take the last two on your own, I am sure of it,” laughed Laurie. 

He pointed at his shoes, enchanting them with a spring, and jumped through the hole above to continue his struggle with Rosier. 

How true that was remained a matter of contention. The long-haired man was faster than her, and despite her efforts, he beat them to their wands, pushing her aside with a sharp elbow. Her lungs were too strained for a sprint, and with sweat pouring salt into her aching wounds, her demeanour had soured. Desperate, she tried in one last fleeting effort a wandless spell.

As the man turned to fire a stunning shot, she said, “Stupefy” as clearly as she could, with one hand clutching her wounded waist.

This time the magic worked, and he fell to the floor knocked out. 

Oh now you decide to do function properly, she whined.

Taking her wand from the unconscious man’s grasp, she checked it for damage before rubbing his fingerprints off. 

Cooing at it like a mother bird, she said to her wand, “My precious baby, never leave me again.”

Meanwhile at the top of the stairs last remaining thug had spied her. He was shorter than the others, and unlike the rest, fired his magic from a mahogany cane with an eagle’s head. Pointing it at Aurora, he took aim, flaring his nostrils with pleasure. Meanwhile Aurora brandished her own wand, and they stood apart from each other, the thug having the advantage of the high ground, Aurora possessing all the brains.

Before she could decide on a course of action, Laurie barged him in the shoulder, knocking him against the wall. His cane snapped and he swayed on the edge of the top step, flailing his arms in an effort to defeat gravity and regain his balance. Laurie then swivelled and fired another curse at Rosier, whom deflected it into the ceiling. The explosions of colour cannoning from their wands were now filling the room with a rainbow haze once more. It was an arresting and visceral expression of war that had the odd effect of inspiring Aurora. Even though the shack was saturated by the hoarse shouts and curses of their magical savagery, the rush and inspirational vibe Aurora sucked in from such violence was hard to resist. 

Sensing an opportunity to be creative, Aurora said “Glisseo”, aiming at the stairs, shooting the spell a few inches below the ailing man’s feet. 

The steps smoothed into a tube, taking on the appearance of a poorly crafted wooden slide. The man tumbled, falling from the first floor like a house of cards, picking up pace as he skidded towards her. 

“Aguamenti,” she then cried. With a prod of her wand, rasping waves of water soared down the tube, capturing the falling man in its swirling embrace. 

Aurora stood back from the staircase and announced the fumbling man, “Remember to keep your arms in the flume at all times, unfortunately there will be no ‘on-ride’ photo, though it comes with a knockout deal at the end.” 

As he plummeted off the staircase, she fired a stunning shot, hitting him directly above the eyes. His body was swept away with the body of water that splashed across the basement floor, forcing Aurora to wade through water that had risen up to her knee, soaking the hems of her dress. She propped the man up alongside the other. They were now resting against one of the boxes, a container of stock heavy enough that it hadn’t been uprooted by the emerging water. 

After correcting the stairs, she crept up, trying her best not to let them creak, as Laurie and Rosier remained locked in an arduous battle. 

They were fighting in the centre of the room, their wands were nowhere to be seen. Instead they were grappling with each other. Rosier, wearing a usual mask that eerily complimented his black gown was on top in the fight, he had his knee pressed into Laurie’s thigh, and swinging punches with wanton abandon. 

Aurora without hesitation, pointed at the mess of limbs, and said, “Stupefy.”

Having flashbacks to the grappling on the floor with Theo and the werewolf on the train, she did her best not to be too pleased at how much more composed she had been this time around. Her spell, hit the Death Eater in the face. Rosier’s mask flew off and he flopped away from Laurie. 

“I guess we’re even then,” groaned Laurie, getting to his feet. 

“Your leg,” said Aurora, pointing at his gashed, bloody knee.

“It’s no worse than your hip,” said Laurie, finding his wand across the room, and putting it back in his pocket.

“I have no idea what it is, you know,” explained Aurora, “stings like a queen though.”

Laurie went over to her and examined the gooey wound.

“It is a mystery,” he said. “I honestly have never seen magic do that, maybe that thug was from Durmstrang or something. They teach weird spells over there at the best of times.”

“Nice shot by the way,” smiled Aurora 

“Do you compliment yourself now?” said Laurie, glancing around at the dozen or so concussed bodies scattered across the room, marvelling at the crater to one side of the floor. 

“Oh yeah, no one else is going to wait around to do it!” teased Aurora. 

Laurie laughed, before gesturing around the house, “And to think this place couldn’t get any uglier. We have left it in a right state. I mean, the Shrieking Shack looked like it had seen some monsters. It’s supposed to even be haunted, but I doubt it has seen anything like this.”

Rosier, confounding their expectations, perhaps aided by the ornate mask, which had been blasted off of his face from the impact of the spell, was crawling across the room. His gloves, torn at the finger tips and covered in dust, were scratching the floor, with his arm outstretched, searching for his missing wand.

Laurie sighed before striding up to Rosier, who continued to grunt in pain. As he saw Laurie approach he tried to quicken his pace, but his crawl ground to a halt as he stumbled over his elbows. 

Duly noting his difficulties, Laurie said, “I see that the anti-apparition jinx backfired on you.”

“Depulso,” Laurie then cried, adding a jubilant cheer as Rosier flew up in the air and hit the back wall. Falling on his knee, he cried out in pain, before flopping onto all fours, and letting out a cough. The exhaling from his lungs air blew out two of his wobbling teeth. He flopped to the floor; face down, his mouth open in a gummy pout that revealed the gaps in his jaw.

“I think we should heal ourselves while we have the time, don’t you?” said Laurie, stepping away from his defeated foe. 

“Do you think anyone will come after hearing all the noise?” asked Aurora. 

“Maybe, but not for a while, this place is meant to be haunted, remember?” Laurie reminded here. 

Aurora nodded and healed the wounds on Laurie’s body, whilst Laurie did likewise to her with his wand. It was a unique situation, as their bodies weren’t even theirs; they were still living in the skins of other people until the potion wore off. It was an oddly pleasurable sensation, feeling the cuts and sores shrink into their skin. The only cut they couldn’t heal was the acidic tear on Aurora’s right hip. Though Aurora, now being blessed with clear hearing and less sore joints than in the previous few minutes, cracked into a smile, thanking Laurie for his efforts.

Aurora’s buoyant mood, however, and her rush of conquest evaporated as Laurie directed his wand for a second time at the fallen Rosier.

With the considered demeanour of a man sifting through his Transfiguration homework, Laurie stared at Rosier, his face blank and unmoved, and said, “Crucio.”

Aurora, whom had retired to a nearby sofa, rose to her feet, caustic vibrations of shock rattling through her insides,

There was no way Laurie could have said that, she thought, her brain rattled in disbelief.

Rosier screamed in pain, his remaining energy spent on thrashing and thriving on the ground He winced and moaned as his already pounded limbs banged and knocked against a nearby wall, leaving bloody impacts on the wallpaper. 

Reaching for her wand, she heard Laurie say, “Crucio” again, this time softly and equivocally, caressing the ‘o’ sound so that it hissed from lips for a few seconds.

It was then she realised that he wasn’t calm out of dispassion. The truth was that he was so livid with rage that he enjoyed the infliction of pain. The torture was satisfying him, sating an appetite built on emotional desire as strong as love but considerably more toxic. A passion called hate. 

Rosier screamed in agony, writhing on the floor, hammering his fist against his knee and spitting phlegm from his mouth. The veins on his forehead seemed to be throbbing and more pronounced, whilst the spikes of his hair were up on end. 

“No, stop, stop it now!” cried Aurora, horrified as Rosier continued to shout and let out gasps of air, sounds unintelligible to her ear but conveying a galling infliction of pain.

Laurie ignored her. 

Aurora thinking of her move against Top Hat only an hour ago pointed her wand at his arm, just as he was about to inflict a third curse, “Crucio!”

The spell landed and Rosier let out another anguished cry of pain, though this one taking a rumbling internal moan. Rosier rolled onto his stomach, and began to sob. Then jaws craned open, he vomited a sea of bile that ran across the surface of the shack and dripped down the gap in the floor to the basement below, like a grotesquely designed waterfall. It was unsettling for Aurora, seeing a dark, sinister and supposedly notional creation – a Death Eater – in front of her eyes in corporeal form. Evil though he may have been, seeing him vulnerable and at their mercy was difficult for her to comprehend. It was sickening, seeing a living, breathing killer on the floor, feeling pain she could understand. She hated how relatable to her he had become.

“Expelliarmus!” she cried. 

The wand flew from Laurie’s grasp, and she caught it with her other hand. Laurie, outraged and appalled, turned towards her and shouted, “Give that back!”

“No,” said Aurora defiantly, hoping her quivering lips weren’t compromising her authority.

Pointing both wands at Laurie she said, “Stay where you are.”

“Bloody hell, Rory,” he complained, spreading his arms in protest and making a move towards her, he still maintained a swagger in his step as he did so.

“I meant it,” she shrieked, “stay back!”

Then with her wand aimed at Laurie, who expressed his disapproval with a sigh, she pointed to Laurie’s over her shoulder and said, “Stupefy.”

Rosier’s bitter complaints ceased, and he lay perfectly still on the floor, unconscious. 

“Right,” Aurora then said, stepping across the living room and away from the sofa until she was standing directly between Laurie and Rosier. 

With both of their wands still in her grasp, she continued, “If you want to try anything like that again, you’re going to have to go through me.” 

“Rory, we really haven’t got time for this,” said Laurie, turning his head to the ceiling and letting out a groan of anguish. 

“Well, I am going to make time,” she countered.

She ripped off her coat and hurled it down the gap in the floor. It hit the pool of vomit-filled water underneath with a splash. 

“Because, before this goes any further,” she said, “I need some answers. I don’t care what this man has done, we are not torturing him, you sick, twisted bastard.”

At that point, Laurie’s look of incredulity ebbed from his features. His grey corneas were now barely visible beneath his narrowed eyelids. Cracking his knuckles, he turned his attention back to Aurora and hurled saliva in her direction, a disparaging spit.

He then said his voice no more than a growl, “You’re a hypocrite, Rory, a pathetic hypocrite. You helped me beat all these men to a pulp. You merely watched as I knocked this shitbag against a wall. Now I use one word, one word with some particular moral connotation, and out comes this silly gesture. I always knew you were weak, this is clearly a world not meant for you.”

Aurora glared at him with contempt and fired a spell from Laurie’s wand, an impulsive purple spark. It missed Laurie’s head by a whisker.

“Get on your knees,” she ordered, “hands on the back of your head.”

“Rory, I…”

“Now!” she demanded, firing another beam of light, this one cyan in hue.

With reluctance, he obliged, taking the last step to the floor with a pained groan, as pressure went on his recently healed but still stiff leg.

She made to put his wand in her coat pocket, before realising in her dramatic exuberance; she had thrown it into a pile of sick. Instead, she was forced to stow it in the strap of her bra so that it protruded from her dress, ignoring the slightly lopsided appearance it gave her. Taking it all in her stride, she went over to Laurie, her own wand in her left hand, and crouched down. 

“Maybe I am weak, or maybe I am not,” she hissed, “but at least I am not you. Now I am going to get some answers on a few things before the world can decide if it’s ready for me. I came along with you. That was my judgement, but here I am calling a halt until I learn what I want to know. 

“Like what?” he snarled.

“Like the blood. It was all over your clothes when we met nearly an hour ago. How did it appear on your shirt? Did you kill the people who wore these clothes?” she said this last part gesturing to both of their attires. 

“No,” said Laurie, brushing her off with a wave of his hand.

“Oi,” said Aurora, “keep that behind your head.”

She gave him a prod in the eye with her wand.

“Argh,” cried out Laurie.

He went rub his face but Aurora fired a curse to the left of his ear again.

“Behind your head,” she repeated.

He was blinking rapidly, as a reactive tear trickled down to his chin. Aurora took a few steps back towards Rosier, wand still pointed firmly at Laurie. For someone so disapproving of torture, her behaviour was treading a fine line, no matter how legitimate her moral scorn had been.

“Seriously, Rory, what’s wrong with you?” he complained, “Of course I didn’t kill anyone.” 

“Then what happened?” she said, slowing each word down for effect.

“I got a tip off that Hughes was double-dealing from the people I know” revealed Laurie. “I went to the Ministry to ambush him and nick his clothes. I got him into a store cupboard easily enough and stunned him, but a security guard happened to stroll past at the wrong time.”

“That’s why you were late?”

“Yes, they held me up, plus it took me a while to find him. Hughes covers his tracks well.”

“So you were reckless, basically?”

Aurora ignored the insincerity of her own words.

“Well,” said Laurie, still shutting and closing his eye to alleviate the pain, “I guess that security still care. More likely, Hughes had paid him to guard his office or something, but anyway, we got in a fight. I had to knock him out with my fist, and I err…broke his nose. Oh, I healed it before I went. He is in the broom closet outside the Department of Defence, having a picnic with Hughes for all I care.”

“And what about this, hmm?” asked Aurora, giving her dress a tug. 

“What about it?”

“It didn’t belong to Lucy Hughes.”

“I bought the dress from a muggle store days back. As for the hair, I found it on Hughes’ suit. There was a trace of it near his lip, and on the inside of his underwear, I assumed it belonged to his wife.”

“Well you guessed wrong,” retorted Aurora. “Clearly that scumbag you’ve been impersonating has been screwing some harpy slut on the side.”

She was glowering at Laurie, in the guise of Mr Hughes, a man whom Aurora had never met but had nothing other than passionate dislike for. She felt dirty, standing there as an imitation of some faceless Ministry worker he had been having his way with. 

He was clearly no more worthy than a feast for maggots, but at this moment Laurie seemed little better. Perhaps inhabiting Mr Hughes had made Laurie worse, or Mr Hughes had been morally degraded by Laurie. His academic distance remained, but the drive and ferocity of his actions shook her to her core. Even with Mr Hughes’ features, she could see his rage and his broken torment, nothing else would have seen him using the Cruciatus Curse like that.

Resisting the labyrinth of her thoughts, she kept the questions sharp and forensic, “Did you even check on Lucy? I mean you clearly had no idea what she looked like.”

“I knew he had a wife. I..”

“Bollocks, you’re better than this Laurie. You have all the brains in the world, but you let these things slide? Do we even know if she was in on all this?”

“I have no idea.”

“I can’t believe you’d be so callous. Well actually I can. My word did you ruin me enough times.”

Laurie rolled his eyes, “This isn’t about you Rory, stop with the bitter vendetta.”

She struck Laurie across the face, his cheeks echoing like a hollow drum. He gave off no reaction as she leant into his ear, with her wand rammed up his ribcage, she said, “You’re right, it’s not. It’s about Rupert, and it’s about Lola. None of this is about you or me. It also isn’t about Lucy Hughes.”

Aurora checked Rosier’s pulse before turning back Laurie, “She could have been completely innocent, a charming little Scottish florist. I imagine that she was utterly unaware that her doting husband, handsome and blond, was in league with Death Eaters and running roughshod over their marital trust with some floozy at work.”

The last bit was particularly bitter for her to say in wake of her parents’ crumbling marriage. 

“Now,” she then said, “after what we have done today, she will be targeted. Did you not think for a moment about these sorts of things?”

“What did you expect me to do, warn her about Lionel Hughes?” jeered Laurie. “That’d break her heart and possibly confuse her to the point she blabs our plan to him? He’d spin her some yarn to try and prove he is innocent. Do you honestly think she wouldn’t believe him? Have you seen what love does to people?”

Aurora bit her lip, resisting the urge to violently respond. At the end of the day he had a point. He may have thrown out a few unforgivable curses, but his rationale here was remarkably fluid. There wouldn’t have been much they could have done for Lucy, and now like many others struggling in the wizarding world, she’d have to look after herself.

Spurred on by her silence, Laurie said, “You came here with me today, to do what we just did. It turns out you aren’t in the guise of his wife, so what? It made no difference. In the same way it wouldn’t if I had come alone. Breaking up his nice little earner always came with the collateral of breaking up the little earners of everyone else in the room too. It is the only way we could get to where we are now. Family of one’s enemy always tend to be targeted, Lucy is the unfortunate fall-girl.”

“And where has that taken us now?” asked Aurora, getting her voice back.

“Well, we were on the cusp of finding out who killed my sister and your brother until you waded in as the bastion of moral virtue. I can’t say I have ever missed your sanctimony.”

“Are you going to tell me who these contacts of yours are Laurie?”

Laurie greeted her question with a silence. 

Aurora softened, almost pitying him, “I can see it in you know - in your face, your touch, and your attitude. You’ve changed, and I am not convinced it’s for the better.”

Not falling for her adjustment of tack, Laurie let out a hollow laugh, “Don’t presume to understand anything about me, Rory. I can’t be read like a book in the same way you can.”

Aurora snorted her censure to his remarks, “Now whose being petty?”

Laurie had become impatient with what he saw as little more than posturing, whatever authentic emotions of discontent had risen to the fore in the past few minutes.

“I know people,” Laurie started, “who worked with my father in the Ministry, alright? They have been happy to help. Also, since I have been working at the Leaky Cauldron, I have heard a lot and made many friends. “

“You would never have friends,” mocked Aurora. “What is your angle Laurie?”

“Revenge,” he growled, flexing his arms as they remained firmly behind his head, “that’s all there is to it. Before you ask, I won’t tell you their names. You don’t have a right to know my sources and, as I don’t plan on sticking around after all this, they will want to get back to their jobs. Then we can both draw a line under this sordid affair. Hopefully, after that, you can get the closure you have clearly been missing for six years.”

“Oh don’t worry me about me, sunshine;” said Aurora, disingenuously, “I’ll be delighted to see you go.”

They both laughed, awkwardly and almost knowingly. There they both were, standing in a dilapidated, supposedly haunted building, at each other’s throats, fundamentally disagreeing on how to respond to the consuming insanity of the world around them.

“Anyway,” said Laurie, eventually, “that’s all I have been doing the last three months, building to this. So what are we going to do now?”

Aurora pulled his wand from her chest and threw it back to him. Then she reached for a phial she had spello-taped to her torso, and ripped it from her skin. Flinching from the sharp surge of pain, she studied the odourless, colourless substance.

Removing the tape that had taken several hairs with it she gave it to Laurie, who had now stood up, and said, “Veritaserum. Some of us think ahead.”

Laurie studied the phial, “It is perhaps the best way to make sure. There’s not too much in there though, might give us a brief chinwag under no pretences, but that’s about it.”

Aurora murmured agreement, before pointing at Laurie.

“Your hair, it is going brown.”

“It’s been an hour; does it matter if he sees who you are? I mean they have your picture on a reward paper already.”

“We’ll obliterate his memory afterwards, I don’t care if that displeases Voldemort or not.”

“He will break through your memory charm, you know.”

“I’d like to see him try.”

“Very well. Your eyebrows are curving by the way.”

It wasn’t painful. 

In fact, it was more humorous in a perverse body-swapping respect as their features took on unexpected hybrids of their guises and actual selves. Aurora at one point couldn’t help but laugh at her thicker thighs emerging alongside Lucy’s thin ankles, making her look like a toy doll in her proportions. Over the course of the next few minutes they stood there, in a dust-ridden living room with a crater to one side, as their facial features resorted to their original state as well. Aurora couldn’t see it occurring, but instead felt her jaw recede and her hair droop across her forehead. Then as she filled out, her dress rose above her knee to mid-thigh. Her body heightened in stature as if she was in high heels, yet it then stayed there, giving her an unusual perspective of the room, her sight and vantage point seeming to elongate its length. Her feet which had shrunk in her boots, now touched the tip of her soles again. 

Aurora, had spent the first few seconds with her eyes shut anticipating, some form of anguish, now had them open and was watching Laurie rejuvenated into his former appearance. This was her first time using the potion, from either perspective, and now she watched Laurie like horticulturalist observed a flower in bloom, batting away her anxieties over her ankles thinning or teeth widening. Across from her, Laurie’s hair was growing, his chest was narrowing and the suit he was wearing became baggy across his midriff, whilst his face remained Hughes’, almost as if he was wearing a sickly mask. Until eventually, those features dissolved, revealing Laurie underneath.

Once certain they had resumed true form, they turned their attention back to Rosier. 

“How should we do this?” asked Laurie.

Aurora moved over to Rosier’s body, and said, “I have an idea.”

“Mobilicorpus,” she barked.

Like a lion cub taken at the scruff of their neck by their mother, Rosier’s limp body was unceremoniously plucked from the ground. It almost seemed as though invisible strings were pulling him, dictated by some giant puppeteer as his legs and arms stretched themselves out, his head bobbing up and down against his chest. Rosier hovered several feet in the air, blues light shining around the edges of his limbs like mystical restraints. He stayed firmly in position, legs and arms far apart.

Cottoning on, Laurie said, “Renevervate.”

Grasping Aurora’s phial of Veritaserum in one hand as Rosier began to stir into consciousness; Laurie marched towards him and pinched the Death Eater’s nostrils. Rosier grunted in retaliation and writhed to no avail against the magic constricting his limbs. He had seen the thin tube in Laurie hand and had guessed its ingredients. In vain, Rosier held his mouth shut, trying to funnel air out of his nose, only seeing it arrested mid-flow by Laurie’s fingers. The whole episode made Aurora feel uncertain but she watched on, knowing it was the only way until Rosier was forced to open his mouth. Though he tried to break through the glass with his teeth, Laurie forced the drink down his throat, clasping his hand around his chin to ensure it went down. After exhaling in frustration, Rosier gulped the liquid, wheezily returning to breathe as Laurie released him. 

Rosier glanced around the room, “Well here I am,” he spat, “still in this pig-ugly shack.”

He glared at Aurora, and putting on a smile of antiquated showmanship, he said, “Ah-ha! The girl I have heard tell of. Five hundred galleons is a hefty price, though when you refuse the bloodlust of a werewolf, there is only so much you can expect.”

Aurora turned to Laurie, “Why do all the villains I meet come with long speeches and a cheap cabaret act?”

Laurie replied nonchalantly, “Clearly you attract the more verbally dextrous crowds.”

Aurora flicked her hair from her eyes, and approached Rosier, who still struggled against the spell, cursing as he was unable to suspend its hold on him. He even tried calling out spells aloud in the room, however, he found that unlike Aurora, he didn’t possess the same knack for them. All he could do to touch was rain her face with his spittle. 

“Now, Rosier,” she said. “We have a few questions.”

“Damn you, you foul little bitch.”

“Play nicely, Rosier. We’re not here for your incisive repartee, as enthralling as it is to listen to. What we want to know is how many Death Eaters are there?”

At the point of a question being asked, his eyes glazed over and rather pointedly, he titled his head up as if reciting a fact from long term memory. 

“Death Eaters….” he queried. “Oh, about two dozen. There could be more but the Dark Lord keeps his other contacts concealed from us. So we can’t reveal too much if we’re caught.

“Has he built himself any army?”

“No, but he has a fair number of spies. He is also friendly with all the crooks.”

“How many spies?”

“Plenty enough to cause trouble. I don’t know the exact number. There are probably at least a couple in every department at the Ministry. Hughes was sort of the intermediary they went through, unless they were of great significance. In those cases they had private sessions with my master.”

After every answer he irritably tried to battle with the charms holding in place once more. It was an arresting sight, seeing his personality shift every few seconds. Before a question he would do all he could to resist, and then as soon as it was asked he would fall compliant and genial, as if almost happy to be spoken to.

“Why haven’t you tried a coup?”

“It isn’t time yet. The Dark Lord still fears retribution from Dumbledore. That I can tell. Besides, we have spies in all other pits and troughs of our world. Taking on just the Ministry seems a little unambitious these days.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been working with Gorgeous George, as you heard. He has a rather handy relationship with the thugs and snatchers across the country. We can shape the nation to our will, given time. They’ve beaten away any rivals gangs and those left over all work for the Dark Lord. He has broken through the confused rabble of different ears for different people on the street so that now, however convoluted the route, every whisper reaches my master’s ear. Luckily for you, their only target at the moment is the Vigilant. Unluckily for you, they are also after any inconvenient whore they meet on the way. A bounty is a bounty after all.”

“What’s his real plan?”

“Rory we don’t have time for all this,” said Laurie interjecting, but Rory threw him off with a dismissive hand. 

“To overthrow wizarding society. It’s been too long,” his voice had become a yearning rasp, “with our noses pressed to the ground, forced to eat dirt. Watching mudbloods and muggles toxify our society, and people like your father destroy order in the name of pointless virtues like liberty. It is a liberty that ruins us with half-breeds controlling our lives, and pathetic, soft-hearted fools like Dumbledore running our school.”

“How’s he going to do it?”

“You honestly think he’d tell me. His grand vision, all laid out to me with maps and charts?”

It was this point Aurora understood two things. Firstly that Rosier would not be in the loop with every detail, and secondly, not only was she get objective facts, but also his opinions, his musings, and revelations over his own insecurities in the group he had devoted himself to. Here Rosier’s character was laid bare to her, dissected at her will until the potion ran out.

Rosier, however, was doing his best to find ways to halt the flow of information. He was asking his head, bellowing at the floor, “No! I can’t let them do this!”

She didn’t know if he was especially opposed to them learning the Death Eaters’ plans, or simply any information about him. He had no sympathy for him, but having your identity laid bare for others to examine was a terrible fate for anyone to endure.

“Look, Rory,” said Laurie, panicking somewhat at the roundabout nature of the conversation, “we need to get to the rub here. Who killed Lola Knight? Who killed Rupert Meadows?”

“Ah interesting question,” said Rosier, licking his lips. He then turned to the side and said, in a vicious whisper, “No, stop this, why are you telling them?”

A few seconds of struggling then ensued as he did all he could to fight the potion. His face wobbled and he exposed his teeth in a harsh grimace. 

Letting out a clownish chuckle he turned back to Aurora and said, “Ok, you win. As a matter of fact, you cursed harlot, I actually know the answer. You see, Voldemort likes to deal with his close followers one-by-one. To stop any of us revealing too much of import if we are taken in by your blundering Auror office. This makes sense from his perspective, but not all of us are happy campers. Three of us in the group are good friends, and we talk to each other about what we do, for our own protection. So if we are caught, we have information to give, to give ourselves a better chance of walking out free.”

“Go on,” she said, her voice stuttering with trepidation.

Rosier knew the answer but perhaps guessing the resource was finite, he was doing his best to stall the truth by lengthening the route to the story. 

“My faith in my master is almost unshakeable, but chaos is a complex thing to control. We need to protect ourselves if this backfires. I’d take two a few years of protection in Azkaban over having my soul sucked out by dementors if this all backfires. Besides, the Dark Lord’s only shortcoming is he underestimates us all. To rebel against him by sharing our knowledge is a risk he would never think we were capable of.”

It was an interesting insight into Voldemort, but Laurie’s patience wore thin.

“Get to the point!” he shouted.

“Calm down, boy,” said Rosier, “Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah! A good buddy of mine told me how he killed your brother Rupert Meadows. Rupert had gone off the charts, Dumbledore was looking for him and our master charged my friend with taking him out. Rupert was moving, from place to place, panicked and alone. Eventually he gave himself away in London, he thought he’d lost track of my friend, but oh no, he hunted him down and killed him. Not a dignified way to be killed, washing your hands in the men’s room. As for Lola, it was him too. He came to your house for the raid and got her with a killing curse in the throat. Just so you know he isn’t remotely sorry for it. In fact, I believe he enjoyed it immeasurably.”

“Who was it?” said Aurora and Laurie in unison.

Aurora’s assertive demand concealed an inner fragility at play. It sounded like a demand, but aside from the phrasing of the question, her tone was that of begging. She had travelled all the way from China for the answer, and now after not a small amount of effort she was about to hear what she desperately needed to. The next syllables from Rosier’s mouth were the defining moments of an ordeal that had pushed her to put her life on the line time and time again.

Rosier for his part, was fighting with every ounce of willpower to keep them hanging as long as possible. As his tongue sought to oblige with an answer, he bit into it. He chewed at the pink flesh, causing it to bleed, hoping to choke on his words and swell the muscles in his mouth to hinder any efforts made by the potion for him to enunciate clearly. He began to choke, smiling as his body violently shuddered. 

Laurie did not have time for this. He let out a roar of frustration. 

He ran at him and swung a punch. With a thud it landed on Rosier’s chin. The pool of blood that collected in his throat then gushed out like a waterfall, colouring the brown shoulder of his Laurie’s suit with a vile, maroon tinge. Bile followed, dribbling over the white of Laurie’s shirt, and a deathly stench of stomach acid diffused through the air. 

With his windpipe clear, Rosier let out a hiccough before revealing, his words little more than a croak, the answer they had all been waiting for.

“Rodolphus Lestrange,” he said.


	16. Mortality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora returns home from the Shrieking Shack, to find that her father waiting for her. The nature of her dreams, and the war at large, takes a further sinister turn.

With those final words, Rosier’s face stretched into a nauseous grin.

Such was the relief of pressure; Aurora let out a palpable, echoing gasp. Now she knew who had killed Rupert.

She had heard tell of the Lestrange family. They were an elitist, blood-status worshipping cult who hated the Meadows family for their abandonment of purity principles. Their position, therefore, as Death Eaters made sense. 

Laurie took a seat on the sofa across the room and rested his head in his hands. His thoughts were lost behind the unconventional enigma of his unique cognitive ramblings. 

Aurora had thought the reveal would have imbued her with a sense of drive and unyielding purpose. To her surprise the thought of another challenge filled her with dread. 

Figuring out how this had anything to do with ghosts, the disintegration of her family, artefacts, Dumbledore was another problem in its entirety. She crouched down, turning away from Rosie, brushing her knees against the floor. Her exhaustion was laid bare and exposed to the maimed mess of a man hovering behind her.

Rosier had noticed that despite the bloody state of his body, her fragility was more prominent, more arrestingly obvious to anyone around them. Though he lacked the sesquipedalian flair of Greyback or the sanguine sneer of Lucius, he did thrive on exposure of suffering, a pre-requisite for any Death Eater. Despite the pummelling he had taken and the succour the two upstarts in front of him had provided in turning his life into one best spent on a wheelchair, they were the ones utterly bare in front of him. The wounds of their struggle betrayed in each of their breaths as they pondered their next moves in isolation. 

It was almost gratifying to Rosier.

Milking the strain etched across their features, Rosier allowed himself one final act of defiance.

He let out a hoarse, equine sounding haw of a laugh, the sound reverberating off of his tired chords, fuelled by sharply exhaled air. The smell of bile once more sifted into the room from the exposure of his wounded jaw. 

Though clearly, this took its toll and after he finished his few, disingenuous dissenting cries, he closed his mouth. Bloody saliva eased from the rifts in his lips, drooping over his chin and lingering there, inches from his face, as a dense droplet of gore before splashing by his feet. 

Then, as the pain came too much, his head dropped against his chest, his neck curved forward like that of a swan, but with his tattoos and splattered skin its elegance and grace was of a coarser nature. 

Unconscious, he remained in limbo, several feet above the ground, with the magic holding him in place like a grotesque act of mystical puppetry. 

His eyes, formerly transfixed on Aurora’s shocked visage, were now vacant and covered behind bruised eyelids, his arms meanwhile were limp in the embrace of magic running across his body, rather than grappling with the forces containing him.

After a while, Aurora stood up from her crouching position.

“Bollocks,” she then spat, cracking her knuckles in frustration for good measure. 

“What?” said Laurie.

Letting out a sigh she turned away from Laurie, instead moving over the hole in the floor, which exposed the flooded basement underneath, before saying, “It’s just, well, I forgot to ask him about the orb. In all the bread and circuses it completely slipped from my mind.”

“Well, that’s quite natural. Some foible about Dumbledore and his knick-knacks wasn’t on the forefront of our minds,” replied Laurie.

He heaved himself of the sofa, marched over to Rosier, studying his facial wounds with the tip of his wand, “He took quite a pummelling and that potion wasn’t going to last forever.”

“I know,” replied Aurora ruefully, “But it could have been linked.” 

She spat through the hole into the basement, watching it descend into the pool below, being careful to avoid the residue of bile coating the timeworn floorboards by her feet.

“Maybe it is,” answered Laurie, equivocally, trying to keep things balanced after the volatility of the previous ten minutes. “Perhaps that is what Rupert was doing. Dumbledore basically confessed to you that they were working together. Though, Miss Renegade, you also heard Mr Bloody’s spiel just there. I doubt You-Know-Who would have let him in on his artefacts fetish beyond his little meet-and-greet with Borgin.”

“But he might have known where it had gone!”

“You think Lucius would have trusted him with that? He was probably protective muscle for the trip to Diagon Alley. I reckon the golden boy gave it to You-Know-Who in person, alone. I mean, Rosier doesn't have the Dark Mark tattoo.”

“I guess,” said Aurora, still unconvinced. “Do you know Rodolphus Lestrange?”

“I know that he is married-in to the Black family. Husband of Bellatrix, You-Know-Who’s mad dog on a very loose leash.”

“Not one to mess with then?”

“Nope, she is vicious - an irascible power hidden behind a veneer of elegant beauty and unkempt dreadlocks. I would go as far as calling her deranged. According to what I heard people saying at the Leaky Cauldron when I first came home, she kills muggles for fun.”

“What about Rodolphus?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.”

Aurora nodded, turning away from him again, surveying the splatters of blood, and the dents as large as bludgers that had gouged the walls. 

She then said, “Well, I guess we’ll have to figure it out later. Are we going to scrub up the mess here?”

“Do we need to?”

“We will leave a pretty big trace if we don’t. You know the fireplace won’t be operable now either, after the Grand Valley rapids found their way into the basement.”

“True,” admitted Laurie, looking at the assortment of concussed, black-clothed warriors scattered across the room.

An uneasy truce had developed as Laurie and Aurora cleaned up the shack. Laurie displayed his usual precise, encyclopaedic knowledge of wand lore as he wearily went about tidying the disorder in front of them. He drained the water, cleansed the blood from the walls, and the reeking, habitual odour of bile evaporated with a whooshing explosion of hot air from his wand. The floor, destroyed as it was by dark magic in the left corner, remained caved in, the legacy of Rosier’s blasting curse tainting the building and leaving its mark. He went to sort out the upstairs as Aurora wiped the memories of all of Gorgeous George’s men before leaving them piled together by the now fixed sofas and chairs.

Admiring her handiwork, she stifled a cry of pain as a surge of discomfort pulsed through her hip, raising her heartbeat, and drumming against her rib cage. With a sway of uncertainty, her sure-footedness briefly dissipated from as she staggered, grinding her teeth in hope of the fresh bout of anguish leaving her senses as swiftly as it had arrived.

She wanted to get home. There Aurora could deal with the pressing matter of her caustic wound away from the attention of Laurie, and then set about her thoughts on the abominable cluster of adamantine doubts over the days ahead. 

Laurie returned, coming down the stairs with a purposeful skip, doing his best to shake off the strain of the fight, and Aurora guessed, attempting to wash over the falling out between them only minutes before.

“Well, apart from the hole in the floor it all looks as good as new. Ok it is as grubby as it ever was, but no longer in ruins at least. I imagine those blasted floorboards, if that Ballymore chap was right about it, will probably spook off anyone staging dogfights here again, though I doubt it will bother any alleged ghosts.”

“I suppose so, well, we made a lot of noise …”

“Yes, I’d have thought someone may have come by now, perhaps the entire haunted business has scared them away.”

As if prompted by a cue from a stage hand nearby, a voice replied to their musings, its sound was magically amplified and penetrated the walls of the shack. 

“Order, order,” it said, its tone was masculine but strained, and belonged clearly to a flustered ministry official, whose timorous nature permeated through every syllable.

“This is the Ministry of Magic. You have broken the peace. You have violated the International Laws regarding secrecy and the established rules on duelling, whilst breaking and entering. You have thirty seconds to surrender yourselves, or face arrest through force.”

“Bugger,” said Aurora, cursing under her breath.

“Doesn’t sound very commanding does he?” said Laurie, peering out the window.

“Come and see,” he then added, gesturing to Aurora.

Aurora looked outside. Below them, in the snow, was a formation of wizards, garbed in official jackets of tweed identical to the group in Diagon Alley only weeks ago. 

“I warned you,” said the man, a portly figure in a purple cot that stood out in the pack, staring up at a window to Aurora’s left, “we will use force…”

His tone had become pleading towards the end, the plummy nature of his iterations lost behind cracked sentences. 

Aurora realised that at best, they thought this was some dodgy trade deal. She imagined they had come to the Shrieking Shack only when forced to do so by the complaining residents, who realised it was more than a casual haunting going on. The men outside helping Fudge seemed irritated; frustrated like brow-beaten bureaucrats. They probably were most annoyed at Aurora for wasting their time, by embarking on this raid when they probably had more pressing priorities. 

They were hesitant too. The tweed conglomerate shuffled awkwardly, trying to peer through the darkened windows. Aurora could hear their mutters and curses through the thin walls of the building. The exceedingly short but damned history of the house was enough to quiver their convictions with trepidation.

“What should we do?” asked Aurora.

“Hmmm…” pondered Laurie, scratching his head, “they are being rather hesitant. Partly because it’s Fudge out there. He is the man I know as our one male punter who buys rum soda at pubs. Clearly the fat sod is worried about causing an incident. No Aurors in that gang, but he brought enough cavalry to give us trouble. It may here not be all the kings’ horses, but it is enough to give us round two if we wanted it.”

Aurora looked at him, and tutted, “I never enjoy sequels.”

Laurie laughed, “The anti-apparition jinx is a bit of a pain. Thankfully, I came prepared hun.”

With a cavalier wink, he took out a moleskin pouch from his pocket and undid the string. He tipped it upside down and after a few seconds of delay, a plastic children’s plate, complete with a bouncing tiger and diva-ing hippo on it, clattered as it hit the ground.

“It’s a portkey,” he explained, “back to our stuff, out by the church.”

“What are we going to do about him?” questioned Aurora, pointing at Rosier, still unconscious behind them.

“Obliviate,” said Laurie, turning to his dangling body and firing a memory charm at his temple.

“Let the Ministry deal with their mighty fine score, though evidence may now be an issue for them, it doesn’t always hold them back,”

As he said this, Fudge’s voice came to prominence once more, “On the count of ten we will fire at the front door….Ten, Nine.”

“This is getting embarrassing,” said Aurora, rolling her eyes. 

Fudge was the least convincing macho man she had ever laid her eyes on.

“We need to go,” said Laurie.

Clutching her side as another jab of pain buried into her hip, she bent down with a groan and hovered her hand over the portkey.

“Five, Four, Three.”

Aurora and Laurie gave each other a nod of approval and grabbed the plate in unison. 

Her vision succumbed to a deceptive glaze of a kaleidoscopic light as she fell backwards through a vortexed vacuum of magic. The hypnotic recession of her senses did little to blur her pain as the pressure built on her exposed hip. Her lips split as she grimaced from the weight on her wound, the corners of her mouth stretching into a macabre expression of intense discomfort.

Then they arrived.

Aurora landed in the snow, flat on her back with a grunt. Laurie rolled to her right, the plate meanwhile soared from their grasp like a Frisbee into the banks of snow far beyond them, lost in consuming abyss of the night sky. 

Aurora put her hand through her dress, she touched blood. 

Her side was still throbbing. It was now becoming close to intolerable, and her skin was soaked in a thicker stream of red than earlier before. Trying not to panic, she pulled herself up and spied Brother’s Keep in the distance, its existence no matter than a tinged glow on the horizon, whilst Laurie searched through the snow and found their two packs, handing Aurora’s to her

Laurie then disengaged from a typical trope in his character, of avoiding hard conversations through an odyssey of aversions to eye contact. 

He stared at Aurora, and said, “We can apparate our separate ways from here. I know you’re angry at me, about what I did in the Shack. Fine. To be honest, I feel I have every right to be furious at you too. Your sense of morality is so confused to me it makes no sense. I can’t understand you. I don’t know what you want, aside from justice. Or what it realistically is: revenge. That’s ok, I want that too. But I think it is obvious to anyone now that despite your hesitancy, you have become a junkie for this. Conflict, you thrive on it. Even more than I ever could.”

He had spoken in a low, colourless monotone, but the severity of his points was apparent.

Then turning back to suffocating blanket of the starless sky, he said, “The day after tomorrow, I will kill Rodolphus Lestrange. We can do it together, or I will do it alone if you don’t show. Meet me tomorrow night, at my place in Diagon Alley, but I won’t wait around. This is something I have to do.”

Aurora hesitated, before nodding her consent to the idea. 

Thinking of home, and the urgency of her wound, she turned on the spot with her luggage in tow. Her differences of opinion with Laurie could wait until later. She had done all he could to conceal the sapping nature of her wound from Laurie, and continued to clutch it as she arrived in the fields outside her home in Wavelock. 

She climbed into her room via the back gate, doing her best to tread carefully through the orchard. As her body continued to throb from the orange toxin, she held her breath and walked in a ballet-esque fashion, light on her feet, and winced as she strained her body through the open window pane. 

Normally the climb up, which she took to avoid the front door, was pretty routine. With her state of injury, however, she found the ascent across the iron pipes lining the brick wall to be exhausting. 

The carpet cushioned her frame as she collapsed over the ledge. Grabbing hold of her bed, she dragged her body up into a standing position, scuffing the carpet as she did so. 

Aurora let out a palpable sigh of relief, fearing that passing out below an open window was hardly the next impression she wanted anyone to have of her. 

Dusting herself down, she cleansed her body of the scrapes and bruises with a flick of her wand, but remained sadly unable to ease or affect the wound plaguing her right side. She closed her window and took in the state of her room.

It was unchecked, unsearched, and remained as orderly and as Spartan as before.

The former state, which had prevailed for so long, of organised chaos, of a whizzbang mess that only she could navigate through her intimate memory of her haphazardly organised possessions, had been lost to the stains of time. Her growth into awkward maturity had quashed her eclectic, Aladdin’s den of a bedroom. She had tidied it vigorously before heading off to China, stripping bare most of its interesting quirks and valuable possessions for use in the Far East. Aurora had not rectified the situation and now it looked like little more than a roomy prison cell. 

She yanked off her dress, and stood by her mirror. Aurora inspected the wound on her hip. Though it hurt less than when it first impacted with her skin, the cut had undoubtedly grown, stretching now to her lower back, curving around her right side. Orange flecks remained amongst the gore, and every few seconds, needling pricks would shoot up her chest, causing her flinch.

The mirror, in its typical Highland drawl, said to her, “No need me telling you that looks a sore one.”

Aurora raised her eyebrow, “If only you knew.”

“If only indeed,” it teased, “I was an antique long before you were born you know. I have seen my fair share of cadaverous sights; this is no more than a flesh wound compared t the stuff I have seen. I have had to sit through honeymoons! And I was in old people’s home!”

“Hmm...” 

Aurora was in no state to offer her own characteristic retort. 

She moved past the mirror, ignoring its breezy goodbye, and sought to wash herself instead. The mirror was referred to in the house as Angus due to its angry Gallic brogue and the fact it normally only commented with combative sarcasm. Rather than aiding anyone, it would, perhaps out of design rather than magical malfunction, do its best to really cut through the vanity of any posing narcissist. She had taken a shine to it seven years ago at a bric-a-brac store in France, enjoying its erudite home truths. It had been in her room ever since offering her a fair modicum of banter, and had clearly taken no offence at being abandoned for four years, merely picking up with her where it left off.  
The shower did little to calm her, or ease her growing pain. She even had to use the towel rail to keep herself on an even keel as the water splashed over her face. Then, after fumbling with a button shirt, she resorted to a sweatshirt and pyjama trousers, before moving back to the comfort of her bed. It was only early evening despite the dense mare of darkness beyond her window, but she hoped that somehow, an early night would heal the cut, or at least offer a crust of relief to her aching body. 

As she lifted up the bedsheet, a rapt knock at the door caught her attention.

“Yes?” she asked.

Aurora dropped the quilt with a further sigh, resigned to additional distractions before the day’s end, and opened the door.

Mardy the house elf, inhabiting his usual blend of pomposity and bowed reverence, greeted her with a courteous nod before saying, “Ma’am your father wishes to see you downstairs.” 

Aurora mulled the matter over, pausing at the door, tapping her fingers on the frame, “He is home already?” 

“Yes, miss, in his office,” replied Mardy assuredly in his plummy tone.

Realising that her father’s will could not be denied, especially as she had wanted to wean all she could about her brother from him – a reality only possible if they rebuilt a foundation that put them on good terms – she turned back into her room and went to her wardrobe.

“Give me a moment to get changed,” called Aurora.

The house-elf duly waited as Aurora, gingerly stripped from her pyjamas and took fresh clothes off the hanger. She adjusted them as she dressed so that they left clear air between her tender, cut flesh and the fabric of her attire.

Then she followed Mardy out the room and back downstairs, doing her best to alleviate the pain by walking at a slight angle, her neck craned to the left. Casting an unusual shadow in front of them, resembling a sort of grotesque prancing ghoul, she caught Mardy’s attention and he gave her a furtive glance of bewilderment before continuing into the kitchen, leaving her to find her way to the study.

Before she could knock, the door swung silently open. Her father was waiting for her, visible from the threshold, haggard and on edge, perched on the armrest of the sofa. 

“Dad?” asked Aurora.

She did her best to keep her voice light in iteration and tone, not wanting to provoke an unpredictable reaction from him. 

Like the interior throughout the house, the study was gently lit by candlelight, and the fire crackled audibly by the eastern wall, the flames nestled below the bookshelf. 

Gideon closed the door behind him with his wand, before striding past her and locking it securely with a rusty bronze key that he pulled from his dark overcoat. Then after, slipping the garment off of his shoulders and removing a rain-sodden hat, placing both items them on a vintage coat stand by the window, he moved back to the edge of the sofa and studied Aurora. 

She meanwhile, not wanting to appear weak or at a disadvantage, was doing all she could to conceal the state of her hip, biting her tongue both figuratively and literally, to keep balance, and also to restrain herself from saying anything she would later regret. Wounds aside, Aurora recognised this was a potentially fateful hour ahead of her. Her father had gone to a lot of effort to see her alone, after their fight weeks before. Potentially he may only have summoned Aurora just to chastise her over one of his many bitter sources of discontentment, but she knew this was her chance to mine him for any information she could about Rodolphus Lestrange, Dumbledore and the gears of war that were grinding to a steady rhythm. 

“This came through my desk today, after Greyback’s summons at the trial,” said Gideon.

His voice was curt, and his movements sharp as he swiftly reached into his pocket and pulled out a form.

It was the medical supplies form from D.J Pippin’s potion, signed and forged by her earlier that day in Hogsmeade.

Brandishing it under his left thumb, he asked, “Are you going to deny this was you?”

Aurora said nothing, and instead flicked an isolated flicker of her off her forehead, trying to stay composed

His voice turned more to a bark as he pushed off from the armrest, and got back to his feet.

“Take a seat,” he said, pointing at the opposite settee, a beige number lit up in an orange glow from the firelight.

Aurora loathed taking orders, and being directed by her father in this fashion wasn’t a particularly dignifying moment, but she swallowed her pride and settled on the couch, doing her best to keep her features neutral as she surveyed her father’s body language.

She did not think it was possible, especially as his auburn locks had been lost to the vigours age long ago, but his hair seemed greyer. His skin appeared wrinkled at the wrist, and the skin below his eyes sagged more than expected of a man in his fifties. His wiry build remained, drooping his suit and undone tie over an awkward frame, but it now seemed frail as if challenged by a gust of wind rather than the body of a defiant judiciary figure that loomed over the unjust and ill-intentioned. 

He was shaking by the glow of the burning wood, his voice trembling and isolated from its usual assertive conviction. 

“I didn’t think so,” he then tutted. “It came at the recess of Greyback’s trial. He pleaded guilty. The day was no health drink. With Crouch angrily shouting down the need for a trial, only to be put in his place by the Minister. With the Vigilant picketing the exits, and with slippery serpents looking to suspend his conviction, or break Greyback out. With that upstart bitch Skeeter harassing the court scribes. All of this came the day after I was forced to give only two year sentences to elitist pure-blood scum who tried to flay a muggle.”

He turned to Aurora, having spat his acrimonious musings at the errant sparks of flame that were popping out of the fire, and giving the carpet a momentary granular glow before they died in the depth of the patterned fibres. 

He screwed his face into a look of grave dissatisfaction before screaming at her, so loudly that the ceiling shook, “Did you not realise that forging my secretary’s name on some back alley form could get me sacked, or worse? I am supposed to be a judge for merlin’s sake!”

Aurora shook slightly in her chair, and moaned as pressure built on her hip as her chest shuddered from the strength of his outburst. Otherwise, she stayed calm, her breath only quickening momentarily before returning to its normal pattern. She observed her father as he stood up and pointed at her, his voice restrained now to a growl but equally acidic in intention. 

“Now, I don’t have a clue what it is you are up to, but I know you haven’t been home, and frankly my dear, you aren’t leaving this room until I know what’s been going on!”

Aurora let out a low whistle, before saying to her father, “Slightly hypocritical there, Dad, you’ve hardly been transparent yourself.”

Before he could respond, she said, as equivocally as possible, “I came because I thought you had something valid to say. I am disappointed in you. Clearly grief poisons people in different ways, and we all have our own wounds to tend to. So if you don’t mind, I am heading back up before…”

She made to get up from her seat, but her father snapped his fingers and pointed down at the beige cushion.

“No you are not!” he said. “Sit down, now!”

Aurora paused. Her body legs remained a few inches off the sofa as she hastily thought the matter through. She could defy her dad. Aurora was pretty convinced he wouldn’t curse her to keep her in the room, whilst it would be foolish for anyone to banish a family member from where they lived, particularly if their erratic behaviour was out of concern for their safety. In the end the decision she reached was both emotive in foundation but also Machiavellian. Aurora pitied him. He had been defeated. By Dumbledore, who had been with him with such purpose before but probably had cut him loose whilst trying to gather resistance against Voldemort, by the Ministry, through whom he had reached high office as one of the Wizengamot judges, and by the case of his dead son and crumbling family. Aurora had seen his presentation, where his leads had dried up, and now he couldn’t even trust his daughter. Despite his efforts for authority, his bluster revealed that she was staring at a defeated man. 

Sympathy reined her in, and she sunk back into the cushion of the sofa, batting him off with a flick of her hand.

“Fine, fine,” she said, “what do you want to know?”

“Why did Dumbledore see you?” said Gideon brusquely,

“When?”

“At the hospital wing, when he told us to wait for you at home. Have you visited him since?”

“Look Dad, I really don’t understand where this is going…”

“Don’t play games with me,” shouted Gideon, stamping his foot on the floor.

He tore up the form and threw it into the fire, watching the lukewarm heat briefly erupt into a rapturous flame. 

“Thank heaven your cousin in accounts buried the details of your mess up today. I hope you weren’t planning on using that ordered Veritaserum on me! What suggestion was that on the form? Lumbago pain relief? Bullshit!”

He strode to her left and grabbed her shoulder, Aurora did her best to not to shake from his vice-like grip. 

“I know when you are hiding things Aurora and I have had just about enough of people not telling me the truth! You haven’t been at home the past few days. I know that, despite everything I have said. Your foolishness nearly killed you on the train, yet you have been off with wanton abandon. Is it Dumbledore? Has he being sending my last living child, my daughter, off on missions behind my back? Is that why you got a new wand?”

He let go off her and pointed at the door, “I am not a fool. The suggestion charm wasn’t taken off my office by accident; I think you’ve been trying to break in. I also hear reports of incidents in Diagon Alley over past few days and now I get an urgent owl over some chaos in Hogsmeade at the Shrieking Shack! Judging by your history of recklessness, I am pretty sure they are both to do with you. Only someone with your talent and your stupidity could cause so much damage. I don’t appreciate being played the idiot here!”

Letting out a curse, he shot the fire with a powerful expression of water that flowed over the wood, and killed the flames with a hiss.

A glint of disingenuous humour flickered across his eyes as he concluded, “It takes some effort for incidents to stand out in this climate, but my you seem to have achieved it!”

He kicked the opposite sofa before going to his desk at the far end of the room. Slumping on the chair, he let out a heaving gasp of dissatisfaction before scanning the papers in front of him.

“I have been going round in circles for weeks, not being able to make headway. Unsure of what to do next and forced to sit idly by in my office, fulfilling my receding number of duties as my own department goes to war with itself. Dumbledore won’t tell me a thing, and to make it worse, you hide behind lies too!”

An insincere cackle, uncharacteristic to his typical inward chuckle, escaped from his lips.

For the first time however, Aurora was angry.

“Lies?” she whispered viciously, “You want to talk about lies?”

As her father had hurled his abuse, and had used her as a punching bag she had sat there and humoured him as much as she could. He had lost any sense of perspective as his own world and notion of success that he had built through the previous decades had crumbled, falling faster than a house of cards. His former accomplishments were almost mocking him. His position of judge, his happy family, and relatively peaceful world had all been mercilessly reversed, dancing in front of his eyes like a retaliatory jig, and any understanding of his daughter’s pain had thus become utterly absent. 

Aurora could only take so much. Her head was pounding, she felt blood trickle down her leg, concealed by her clothes but unlikely for much longer, and the toll of her day’s exploits left her utterly disoriented. Aurora’s vision was blurring round the edges to the point her father at the far end of the room seemed like little more than a surrealist sketch. Above all, the emotive burden of fighting for her brother and witnessing the decimation of wizarding society whilst her own family was little more than the embers of shared but withered blood, had become increasingly overwhelming.

She continued in a low whisper, “I am your daughter. I came home because Rupert is dead. It is that simple. Worst of all, you accuse me here and call me every name under the sun, yet you won’t even explain what went wrong. You say Dumbledore is concealing information from you, but honestly why should they trust you, look at the way you put the blame on me! I would have all the bloody sympathy for you in the whole world if you had just let me in. Instead, you vanish into the mask and shadows of your own sense of purpose and honour. You’re a husk of what you were when you behave like this. Why can’t you see that?” Her words were harsh but her tone became pleading as she said, “Dumbledore and I only spoke together once, in his office. He let slip that Rupert and him were working together. I know that for a while clearly you were in with the rebellion they all know you.”

Then in a more sarcastic voice she added, “Everything else I have solved has been done without anyone’s help, thank you very much. A fat lot of good Dumbledore’s been quite frankly.”

“You disobeyed me,” replied Gideon sharply, putting away the papers on his desk.

“Disobeyed?” cried Aurora, rising to her feet. “I am twenty-two, what are you talking about? This isn’t pack loyalty. The real disloyalty here is your failure to keep us all together. I know you’re suffering. I can tell. But so am I. And I am struggling here, really struggling, because none of this is making any sense. I have never felt so alone in my whole life. You talk about not telling the truth, but why won’t you let me help you with Rupert, and why won’t you allow me to understand what has happened to my mother? Yes, I know that she has suffered for a long time, but to see her as she is now, abandoned to the rambling incoherence of her own poisoned mind is an absence that I deserve an explanation for! I love her, Dad, and I thought you loved me like I love you. This though, isn’t going to work anymore. There are Death Eaters, there is conflict everywhere, and in the midst of all this darkness, all we want is something to cling to, and you won’t even tell me what the hell has be going on. I lost my brother, our Rupert, and every time I try and think of any light at the end of this, all I see is death!”

A film of tears caressed the bottom of her eyelids; werewolves and Death Eaters could no longer break her but her father always could.

“Aurora…” said Gideon, shocked, taken aback by her exposed fragility, lost as he had been in the indulgent tempest of his own fury.

Aurora juddered, her knees shook, and then feeling her head lighten as if it had been filled with hydrogen like an old zeppelin balloon, she staggered back onto the sofa. 

Gideon pulled himself off his chair, and ran across the room to his fallen daughter.

“Rory….” 

Unable to move and feeling the blood flow from her wound and sink into the cloth of the furniture, she replied, her voice returning back to its defiant snarky overtones, “Don’t worry it’s not my heart, that was destroyed long ago.”

She pulled up her shirt, and showed Gideon the gaping hole in her side.

Without questioning her, Gideon studied the cut. His face was carved with concern, though his breathing remained startlingly composed. He had returned to the position he had been in fifteen years before, as her daughter had cut herself stumbling over a garden rock of some kind with her brother. The reality of her in pain, Aurora realised, had enlivened his former self, and he analysed her wound the same way he had done in decades past, keeping cool in an effort not to panic Aurora, despite the severity of the break in skin. 

Taking hold of her leg, he swept her body anti-clockwise until she was lying horizontal on the sofa, rather than merely slouched across its corner. Then, folding her shirt so the cut remained exposed, ignoring the red colouring the cushions, he wordlessly went to the far corner of his office.

Aurora couldn’t see what her father was doing, though she heard the screech of metal and assumed he was turning the dials on his old safe, which opened with its typical hollow clang as the door knocked against the wall. 

He came back to the sofa with a purposeful stride, holding an ominous, glowing bottle. 

“What is that?” she murmured.

“Anti-toxin,” he explained, unscrewing the glass lid so that it made a resonant clink as it came free of the bottle. 

He turned to her, wiping the dust from the label, giving it a second check. 

Then he poured the liquid, purple and smoky in texture onto a thick white cloth that rested in his left hand. Oddly enough, the liquid gathered on top of the fabric like a small pool, rather being sinking into the material. It made a foreboding hiss sound as it escaped the rim of the bottle.

“This is a solution that will heal the tear,” continued Gideon, as Aurora held her breath, making every effort to steady her ribs as a fresh bout of pain consumed her sense. The caustic orange toxic was wearing through her tissue, the room began to spin.

As painful as it was, Aurora was doing her best to not succumb to a double edge sword. She was battling away her panic, trying to keep her temperament even at the possibility of the solution being as painful as the cut or as ghastly as the hisses the compound made on the cloth. 

For whatever reason, now next to her father, despite the fact her trust in him had waned, her body was filled with an unusual euphoria at seeing him care and dutifully come to her aid. Knowing her best, he began to explain to her the solution in his hand, aware that such an appeal to her intellect would calm her nerves. 

“The solution is from a manticore tail.” explained Gideon. “In the sixties, Durmstrang pupils smeared their wands with corrosive magical chemicals, often of their own recipe, so that their spells would be imbued with a burning light that would carve through skin on impact. Given enough time, without treatment, the chemicals would eat away at the muscle and eventually vital organs. Thankfully, once things began turning south at the Ministry, I got myself prepared for any unfortunate outcomes, or further unfortunate outcomes I should say. Manticore tail heals pretty much anything. Now, grab my shoulder, because I can’t pretend this is the nicest remedy.”

Aurora held on as Gideon, sitting on a stool by the sofa that seemed to have come from nowhere, her sense tainted with an infection of delirium, applied to purple liquid to her hip.

On contact, steam spilt from the edges of the cloth, hissing like meat in contact with hot fat on a stove. The solution penetrated her cut, and seeped through her bloodstream. Aurora was consumed by a jarring pain, peppering her nerves in waves. She tried to move her hip away, an instinctive spasm of cowardice, but her father held onto her waist as he pressed on the cut. As stoical as Aurora attempted to be, she was in no position to resist and caved in, wobbling momentarily, before letting out a scream, louder than any in her life before. Louder than the one when she broke her knee falling down a well at the age of eight, louder than the one when she found acromantula in the Forbidden Forest on her first trip out of the grounds after dark, and even louder than the wordless scream that disbursed her very being when Greyback throttled her on the train. 

Gideon did her best to calm her, making shushing, gentle gestures, but held firm with the cloth, as she sobbed. Her sense of rationality had vacated her from the blood loss, but Gideon, sleeves rolled and filled with a loving determination and a sense of purpose that had been lost to him as his leads on Rupert had dried up, continued to press on her wound with the solution.

It took quite some minutes, but the antidote began to have an effect, destroying the orange, pernicious inflections dotted through her flesh, and soothing her wound, even healing it soon after by knitting the tissue back together.

When lucid thought returned to Aurora replacing the constant shocks of pain, and the swirling mass of blurs in her vision, a sense of embarrassment began to creep in. She had screamed and cried like a baby in front of her Dad.

As she peevishly looked at the ceiling, acknowledging the pleasant sensation of skin forming fresh on her body, her father sought to placate her.

Rather than bemoan her idiocy, he had set to healing her with fierce determination, and now spoke only consolingly.

He spoke tenderly as he explained to Aurora her mother’s fall from grace. 

“Elizabeth has had problems with trauma, Rory. She had them long before you and Rupert were ever born. Her upbringing as an orphan in the Hebrides contained some quite horrific episodes. I never said, but she even went to St Mungo’s twice after two prolonged occasions of panic in her twenties. Your mother has tried to take her own life, five times. Despite some rather hopeless care, her condition eventually abated. For a couple of decades after that, she managed it all very well, an uneasy but radiant, fluttering butterfly in all of our lives. My proud family of former pure bloods wanted me to cut her loose, but I could never do that to her, never! Her recovery was seen as my vindication.”

He said the last line with a smile, but his face darkened as he continued on.

“Sadly it returned, really out of nowhere, with little explanation and she refused to see a healer. Even in the realm of magic, there is little we can do for afflictions of the mind. I didn’t want her being forced into care and thus our marriage has deteriorated to a ruin. Her presence is a grisly reminder of the wife I feel I have already lost, the mother that disappeared from you like a vapour. It is also a blunt confirmation of my failure; I have sacrificed this family for my ascent through the Ministry ever since I matured from adolescence. No notions of honour and purpose can rescue me from that. Rupert had, and Dorcas is, aware of all this as her condition worsened when you were in China. No potion can solve it, no wave of a magic wand. Dorcas comes back as often as she does really to keep her company. I am afraid it is futile. She put on a show of sanity for you when you first arrived, and at the funeral, her tears and sudden grasp of reality were glimmers of transcendent hope on a day that was otherwise so suffocating and bleak. But they were what they were. I heard from Bathilda that you even asked her daughter to check up on her, and frankly they were right, aside from sleep, all I can do is hope her occasional returns to form increase over time.”

Aurora gave herself a few moments to let it sink in, glad the effects of the solution had nullified to the point it was bow painless on her skin, though her father ensured it was still in contact with her flesh. She gave a pronounced nod, trying to convey her thanks and also her recognition of what he said, without swallowing the pride to put it in words. 

There was a long pause as they both waited for the wound to fully. 

“I am sorry I never fully told you,” Gideon finally said, looking down at the ground, away from Aurora’s downtrodden gaze and glassy eyes now enraptured by another pathos-ridden film of tears. 

He added, kindly, “When you first saw her begin to change on your fourteenth birthday, the truth is I was too paralysed with fear by the return of her condition to fill you in. If I am honest, the full circumstances were hidden from you out of my own sense of shame Rory. I blamed myself. It is my failings to have been with her after I climbed the ladder of promotions after promotions that caused her to revert back to how she was.”

“As for Rupert…” he said, reaching for a tonic glass on the floor that he must have poured on his way back to the safe, with Aurora in a state of pained irrationality. He gave the drink a quick sip.

He asked Aurora, “How much do you know?”

Aurora shifted on the sofa, pulling her shoulders up so that they rested on the armrest and that she could turn to her father as she spoke.

Her father let go of the cloth. Now, the blood notwithstanding, her hip looked as good as new, with warm skin knitted over her hip- the only exception being a blotchy scar from a few centimetres to the right of her belly button to the back of her kidney.

“Yes,” Gideon, “I am afraid it scarred.”

“Another to add to my collection,” muttered Aurora.

She thought it was more than a fair observation, as her body was littered with them.

Knowing now was the time to speak the truth, however, she revealed, “I heard your conversation with Mad-Eye and Kingsley, that’s why the charm was no longer on the door.”

Gideon greeted her words with a resigned smile, and a nod that almost suggested he had seen his suspicions found correct. Before he could muster a response, Aurora blurted out, “Dad, I know who did it.”

She looked above her head, ignoring her father’s searching eyes, her eyes drawn to the elaborate ceiling patterns as if observing beauty and splendour of the cosmos, her attempts to be vacant concealing her shaking uncertainty over her explanations.

“On the day of the funeral,” she said, “I snuck out at the end to go to Diagon Alley. That’s when I got a new wand. Today, I tracked down a Death Eater, Rosier, and he told me under veritaserum that it was Rodolphus Lestrange who killed Rupert.”

Her father studied her for a moment.

“Rodolphus Lestrange?” he confirmed.

Aurora didn’t deny her own words.

“I see, well,” he murmured.

Gideon stood up, pushing the stool across the floorboards with a scrape of splinters.

“Is that what the chaos was in the Shrieking Shack only half an hour ago?” he asked, stroking his chin.

“We knocked out Rosier there, and obliterated his memory,” replied Aurora.

Gideon greeted this news with a stroke of his chin. 

Returning to another aspect of his character, he strode across the room, pacing as he thought of the ramifications. The greying hair now defied the youthful guise of his features as flashes of his usual determination powered his judgements.

“I know they raided the building,” he deducted, “So I assume they took Rosier. They have hushed it up if they have, considering the pomp they made over Greyback and the first day of his trial earlier this afternoon, I can’t see why though.”

He then turned back to Aurora, who remained silent, only her tears from the intensity of the solution and the volatile of their conversation not ceasing from the interlude.

“That’s not all is there?” he asked. 

Aurora looked at her father and said, “I have been followed, at least twice, once by Mundungus I think and also by Alice Longbottom. Dumbledore hasn’t spoken to me since we met at Hogwarts, as I said, but I think he could be watching me. It just doesn’t seem right.”

“You think he’s up to something as well, then?”

“I don’t know.”

Her father was not convinced by the response, so she added hesitantly, “When I was in Diagon Alley, I tracked down an artefact, a relic, called Ariel’s Beaker. Lucius Malfoy, another Death Eater, took it from Borgin and Burke’s and delivered it, I imagine, to his master. He said he desired it. Apparently You-Know-Who has wanted it for some time, maybe it is valuable for the full-scale war on our doorstep.”

Gideon looked at her with a degree of puzzlement, whilst Aurora noted his confusion and said, “It gets weirder.”

Continuing with a chuckle, she explained, “When I was in Dumbledore’s office, Dumbledore showed me an orb. He also admitted to me he was working with Rupert before he died. I think it might have had something to do with the orb, but that is only speculation on my part. Anyway, once he cleared up the mess, such as who killed Rupert; he said I could join the resistance. He wanted to solve the murder before inviting me and I imagine, you, into his fold properly again. But I think the political turmoil has worried and unsettled him. I have heard nothing from him since and I have no idea how far he has got with finding out anything. Interestingly, the orb he showed me was identical to three on the artefact. And there was a gap on the antique in the store and Borgin even admitted that it was broken so...”

Gideon interrupted, “And that is why Dumbledore was so interested in Caracatus Burke and his funny disappearance. An old man of wearied age, easy to get rid of…”

Gideon had descended into personal rambles, “Ariel’s Beaker, a very old legend…”

“Do you know what it does?” asked Aurora, sitting up on the sofa, expecting to feel aches and pains but instead finding her hip relieved of any burdens, soothed by the toxin. 

“Sadly no one has more than theories. I even assumed it was fictitious,” answered Gideon. 

“As I said,” Aurora replied, “I think that is what Dumbledore and Rupert were doing together, trying to find the orb. Though I don’t know why they needed it, or what it had to do with his death.”

“Oh, I think I do now. In fact I am also convinced your theory is true,” said Gideon.

His register lowered as he asked, “Did you happen to go in Rupert’s room by any chance?”

“Yes.”

“And you saw I had been there, I take it?” 

Aurora nodded. 

“When it comes to Rupert, there is more I knew than what I told Mad-Eye or Kingsley. There was only so much I felt comfortable revealing, but I now understand I probably have no choice but to tell you everything.”

He went to a file on his bookshelf and pulled it loose, placing it on the desk.

Gideon then turned back to Aurora his voice an uneasy blend of triumphant but morbid.

“Your words have confirmed to me a theory that has clouded my mind for weeks,” he said.

He sat down on the settee opposite Aurora, the file back in his hands, and nonchalantly cleansed the surrounding furniture of blood before saying, “I had guessed Dumbledore was working closely with Rupert.”

Gideon paused, deliberating his next move, “I guess I should start with the backstory.”

“Your brother was promoted quickly through the Magical Law Department, climbing the ladder effortlessly within weeks of his arrival, with minimal nepotism on my part. Sure enough, he made his enemies. His letters to you were always imbued with that pointed sense of modesty that contradicted his big ambitions. So, you wouldn’t have known that he caught perhaps thirty criminals in the first six months of his job there. You probably also wouldn’t know that after marrying Stacey at nineteen, she died in a staged mugging, planned by Death Eaters in the middle of London. Some nerve for murder.”

He took in Aurora’s reaction; she appeared unmoved but her hand that was shaking, her fingers vibrating in response to his continued disclosures. 

“With grief consuming his every breath, he turned to the people he had served for help,” said Gideon, “for justice of some kind, but even at that point a year or so ago, the Ministry was hardly obliging. They didn’t help any of us, and in fact, it was my struggles to find out more across the departments that has led to my forced retirement. I hadn’t told you this yet, but it has been agreed that the old guard should move aside in court. Both the bloodthirsty like Crouch and the officious like the corrupt magistrates whispering in our deluded ministers’ ears are delighted by these developments. Principle’s departure from the harbinger’s doors is a godsend to those wanting blood, and also by those that want a society run by blood instead. 

The Ministry had tried to bury it all, like with Rupert and so many others now, and I imagine that they were at the very least wilfully blind to the deaths of muggle wives and husbands of wizards, especially ones with political enemies like your brother. They may even have had men complicit in it, I can’t tell for sure. Were it not for Kingsley and admittedly, my ability, to set up a sting, then the snatchers involved would have got away with it. Sadly before they could change their pleas or let any of us know of the roots of the criminal gangs, they died in an “attempted escape” on the way to Azkaban. It was clearly another corrupt official in collusion with Death Eaters, who killed them before they could talk – all hushed up in the press.”

Gideon spat at the floor before noting, “It is one of the many reasons Dementors, current allies of You-Know-Who, are being considered as guards for the prison in the future. A bribe of souls seems tantalising enough.”

Aurora took it all on before saying, “Continue….please.”

Gideon looked at the fie in his hands and stroked the leather almost lovingly before saying; “Rupert gained a fierce and righteous sense of purpose, an absence of our mortal bitterness, and carried through with an unseen drive. I was forced to keep my mouth shut in the Ministry - fearing arrest from blustering goons. Then, out of the blue, Dumbledore approached the pair of us. He came to our door with a polka-dot umbrella and a rather curious implement for turning off our lights, and offered me a position in a resistance movement that he was setting up. Oh, his voice, Albus has a honeyed way with words when he wishes to. It was a domestic and international coalition of people in high places who were going to try and prevent or abate the initiation of a full on war through counter-politics and sly take-downs of the emerging Death Eaters and thugs. Your brother was offered a similar role, we were both wanted. I suppose because we had Ministry links. So every day, I sat at my desk, did my justice duties on whatever matters required it and watched liberty die. All on Dumbledore’s orders, of course, as I’d have left in protest months ago. So I would report to him and the ten or so others he had signed up, in our meetings at hidden locations across the country.”

Gideon continued to twirl the thin, black leather file across his hands, struggling to keep eye contact with Aurora.

“It became apparent that the evil nature of You-Know-Who couldn’t be defeated from within his own group, the core was undeniably loyal. It was increasingly obvious that though we could potentially stem some of the corruption, there was no way of effectively using the Ministry as an organ of authority for good; they were enemies to all of us who aided Dumbledore. Within months, it was a dirty war that even the Ministry won’t be able to deny the existence of for long. The days of loose werewolves, rumours and hardened criminal gangs being the worst of our issues were long gone. Like today, those matters are walk-on parts in a much bigger conflict. Whatever the case, Dumbledore took a shine to Rupert. He never explained to me why or how he was vital, though it appeared obvious he was. Being a glad fool, Dumbledore’s appearance in our lives, whom I had always got on well with, was a beaker of hope. I was even thinking, in the recesses of my mind, that he might have a mystical cure for Elizabeth. My guard was let down, I never questioned the legitimacy of whatever it was they were up to, and Mad-Eye, Kingsley, Alice, Fabian, whoever, they all agreed - it wasn’t worth questioning him on the matter.”

Gideon’s face turned to a scornful visage as he growled, “I think they are scared in all honesty.”

Aurora could understand this observation, and for the first time in years she felt a connecting empathy with him. 

Gideon ploughed on, “In the months before you came home, Rupert was leaving for longer and longer spells. He had sold his flat in London after Stacey died and moved back in with us, only to never see him much after a few weeks of his return. He handed in his notice at work too, and became enthused and dedicated to the task given to him by Dumbledore. I confronted Albus at Hogwarts, in his office; and he calmly confirmed to me that Rupert had been given an assignment for the resistance. It was the first time he had admitted that openly, but then he told me to wait until Rupert returned before asking more questions.”

He hesitated before revealing the next words; Aurora was leaning forward in her seat so her body was at a “v” shape, reeled in by Gideon’s remembrances of the near past. 

“Well,” muttered Gideon, “he came home one night, from out of the rain. Pale, cold, and shaken, shivering a silent stream of tears that he couldn’t wash away. Even when he calmed down, and sat by the warmth of the fire, the streams didn’t dry. Rupert had no idea why, but he was leaking teardrops, not even a touch from his mother could ease the flow, despite any smiles or laughs he conjured a misery that haunted his features.”

Gideon stopped and took out a pipe from his pocket, “I am afraid it is no good, I am going to need a smoke.”

His hand quivered as he lit the pipe. Tobacco fumes ruminated through Aurora’s senses as the smell crept up her nostrils. It was unusual for her father to ever smoke, his pipers were normally little more than collector’s items for show. 

Gideon stared into the mesmeric flickers of red from his pipe, Aurora utterly transfixed by his every movement. She doubted she would hear observations so personal in her life again.

“There were noises in his room most nights. I went to check but every time he insisted he was fine. At first I feared that maybe his mother’s condition had some inheritable quality, but no I don’t think they are linked. I think he was slowly losing his grip on reality, and every time he returned he looked more off colour. Then eventually he didn’t come back. Dumbledore also had no idea where he had gone. I hear that he searched for him for days. Good, I would with his level of guilt!”

Aurora watched him take another deep inhalation from his pipe. 

“Despite my insistences on helping him find Rupert,” Gideon rasped, “Dumbledore managed to convince me otherwise. He told me to wait and trust him, after everything, to find our boy. After keeping me in the dark for so long, Dumbledore demanded even more of my trust. The situation was in his words ‘very delicate’.”

He tapped the file in front of him. 

“That is when I went to his room. This is where the orb makes a lot more sense now.”

He turned the leather file towards Aurora, and opened its inside cover. It was littered with sketches and doodles, just like the books Rupert used to draw in as an enthusiastic teenager when honing his craft.

Gideon flicked the past the first page, and showed Aurora a drawing on the second piece of paper. 

It was the orb.

The picture was perfectly conceived, the drawing was uncanny in its resemblance to the fragment Dumbledore had shown her in his office. The orb wax there on the page in pencilled tones, with the rim of gold protruding outwards from one side. 

Additionally, a beaming light echoed from the glass, lighting the page with a graphite glow. 

The orb had glowed for Rupert.

“I saw it,” said Aurora, tracing the page with her finger, “I promise you. I touched it. When I was in Dumbledore’s office and he asked me if I knew what it was. I am telling you - that segment, that piece, belongs to the beaker.”

Gideon closed the file again, “And you definitely saw the other three orbs in the store?”

“Yes.”

Gideon went to open the file again, but hesitated. 

Mirroring her father’s early techniques of interrogation, Aurora asked, “It doesn’t end there does it?”

“No,” he said, gravely.

For a brief moment, a genuine look of fear encapsulated his features as he said, “You might not want to see this Rory, are you sure?”

A bleak smile flickered across her face as she said, “Show me.”

Gideon spread the file open across his lap and took out a dozen pieces of paper, blank on the side facing Aurora. He stacked them vertically before turning them round and exposing their true composition to her. 

The first picture was a sketch, like the orb, though of a man, sallow skinned though with complimentary features. His hair was scraggly and worn, its fringe protruding from a thick hood. The depiction however, of the eyes, at the centre of the paper, transfixed her attention. They were arresting, startling, frightening, consuming and unfathomably threatening for mere graphite scratched onto a shaving of a tree. The lids were coloured black, the skin circling his iris shaded and violently patterned so that his eyes took no definitive figure and instead came across as more of a fiery, nihilistic vortex.

Underneath the portrait of the man’s face, and below his slender neck, it said in jagged capital letters, “BARNABUS.”

With that, a mephitic comprehension imbued her senses, a grave revelation that danced through her being, taunting her. It was the man from her dreams.

He had held a knife.

Or something like that, thought Aurora. 

She couldn’t fully remember, but his eyes reverberated from the page, filling her with a nascent dread to match the undesired déjà vu from the image.

Gideon pushed the page to the back, and revealed another. 

It was a woman. 

Middle-aged, wrinkle faced, and with a dress sense both antiquated and sinister in design exposed by the sketch of her puffed, eagle-broached shoulders. Her pudgy cheeks distorted the bones in her face and her hair was pulled back in a tight bun. Most threateningly, sockets only existed where he eyes should be, squeezed into narrow slits by excess fat, but nonetheless ominous in depiction. Unlike Barnabus, there were no smudges or intentional blurs. Instead of indistinct patterns, the sockets were coloured jet blacked, the pencil scrubbed hard on the page. 

To the right of her ear, Rupert had also scrawled, “Time. So much time. Time everywhere.”

The word everywhere had been written with such ferocity there was a hole, a substantial enough gap that revealed the next picture.

Gideon showed it to Aurora.

It was the woman again. It was identical in shape, to the point it seemed traced, though his time, maggots crawled from her eyes, and dense streams of blood poured from her chin. Her wrist could also be seen, raised and holding a knife aloft. 

Aurora gulped, the woman was terrifying but also devastatingly familiar. Like in the case of Barnabus, her existence reverberated through her conscience, striking beaten ground in her mind.

The vividness of her brother’s drawings exposed a raw emotional candour more horrifying than anything he had sketched. His fragility, his torment, his state of mind had been exposed to Aurora in full light. He had died in fear – consuming, intoxicating fear.

Rupert had been poor at expressing his sadder moments as a child. Anything that upset or disquieted him was concealed behind his usual cheery demeanour. Her parents had realised that Rupert’s drawings had tended to instead, be a better gage, an emotional thermometer to his state of mind. The times as a child he was bullied, or felt a sense of disappointment in a failure to achieve one of his ambitions, he would draw it on a page, often through the camouflage of some sort of poetic distraction, and Aurora would help her parents decipher it. 

This was a tradition that continued until he left for Hogwarts, where his continued kindness but huge, beaming ambition remained, and he found healthier ways of expressing discontentment.

To see him recede so beautifully, and draw bare-faced terror without any concealment had a corrosive effect on her equilibrium. Nonetheless, she ploughed through out of a sense of duty and nodded for her father to show her more pictures from the file.

Then he pulled away the page and revealed the next picture.

It was the skeleton, propped this time on a chair. Aurora remembered, at once. 

“Meridia,” she murmured. 

Her father coughed in agreement, pointing at the word written in the top left corner. Rupert had known her as Meridia too.

Aurora had no idea what this meant, but before she could attempt to comprehend it further, she realised her father was finding it difficult to maintain his composure. Hi fingers shook as he turned to the next page from the file, and his delivery speed had risen sharply. 

The next page showed a shaded outline waiting under a moonlight sky, for a boat in the distance, just beyond a wooden pier. 

Admiring the boldness of Rupert’s craft amongst the moribund nature of the affair, she saw how masterfully he had detailed the curved figure of a shadow, hunched over as if battling the elements. She could picture a pestilent breeze that had also caused the sails of the boat to flap in the picture. 

A baby lay in the shadow’s arms, and a chord of remembrance from her nocturnal fantasies struck again. 

She had seen babies before, one may even have whispered to her at Theo’s cottage.

All the pictures were non-magical, unmoving creations, though the life expressed in the outlines was undeniable. 

After this only drawings beyond Aurora’s comprehension appeared.

One detailed a crystal ball, clear and smooth on a stand, swirling an ethereal white that was markedly similar to the orbs in Ariel’s beaker.

Another depicted a tent, with trees and knives nearby, whilst another was of a charioteer, in Dark Ages garb, riding across a moor. 

Lastly there was an arresting drawing of two people, female twins, in boater hats and rowing club suits, sitting on a bench, with gravestones marked with the names of Rupert Meadows and Stacey Meadows perched on a hill behind them. They were unnamed. 

Gideon, eyes still moist with a fraught sadness, squeezed her palm and said, “I am only going to ask you this once: do you recognise any of these people?”

Returning the pressure on her father’s firm hands, she said, “Yes - Barnabus, Meridia, and the baby. They were in my dreams.”

Feeling both frightened and embarrassed, Aurora said, “I can’t remember exactly how, but some of them….when I see them drawn out, they all feel utterly familiar to me. They were nightmares I think. They only appeared after I touched the orb, and then when I was at Theo’s I heard someone speak to me.”

She let out a tense bout of laughter, radiated by her nerves before explaining to Gideon, who studied her intently as she talked, “Maybe I should have mentioned it earlier, but I mean…. how often does anyone try and find rationality from the transmundane. There were other things too, not on the page, like roses, so many yellow roses…I must sound mad to you.”

No, you don’t sound mad. Clearly Rupert was plagued by the same dreams that you have experienced now, or similar ones. I can only assume that it made him insane.

He then looked at her again, and said, “There are others as well.”

Gideon, his eyes glistening with tears, got up from his chair, and went to his blackboard behind his desk obscured by a curtain.

“These ones, behind this veil,” he said, hesitantly, “have plagued my thoughts more than all the others, and made me desperate to find leads, which thanks you, I may at last have.”

He pulled back the curtain.

Rather being adorned with investigatory maps and charts such as when Aurora had observed the board through the upstairs room, it was now displaying three further drawings by Rupert.

One was of a wrist, her brother’s wrist, she recognised it by the freckly depiction accurately recorded on the page. It was bloody, with slits across the skin, obviously implemented through a sharp blade. 

The second picture, of an almost postcard size, was of a black garbed figure, with a creeping hood and scythe.

The last drawing, consisting of twelve pieces of parchment spellotaped together, was of Rupert himself. His face pale, and sallow, with features stretched across strained skin, detailed her brother’s state of terror.

His hair, messy and unclean, was ruffled across his forehead and unlike the other pictures, it was enchanted with magical movement. 

The chin was covered in blood, and the shoulders at the bottom of the drawing were scarred and messy, with smoke rising from the wounds.

Every few seconds, Rupert would open his mouth and silently scream, revealing teeth as jagged as crumbled tombstones in a graveyard. 

Words would appear on the page each time he screamed saying, in capital letters, “KILL ME.”

Aurora, understanding the finality of his fate in the toilets for the first time, sat perfectly still on the sofa, unable to think of any way, emotionally or physically to respond. She was overwhelmed. 

He may have died at the hands of Death Eaters, but the affect these dreams had on his well-being and their link to the orb, was a galling truth to Aurora. 

Her father clued the curtains and with admirable restraint, said, “This is why when it comes to justice for his death, and understanding why he died, I refuse to take no for an answer.” 

He continued, “The orb, part of an old artefact like Ariel’s Beaker may even have properties beyond our comprehension. After helping Dumbledore recover it, for whatever reason, either for the war effort or Dumbledore’s selfish desire, it must have had rather consequential affects.”

Gideon’s recitation of his observations was said in a detached, almost uninterested fashion but Aurora knew that both the relief at creating a breakthrough, and the grief of how his soon had been taken from him were dictating his emotional equilibrium. His efforts at cold science were his coping mechanism. 

He scratched his chin as he continued to deliberate, “Well, Rupert had made fiends of Death Eaters as well as the standard brute on the street by the time of his passing. When he ran away from home, out of contact from everyone, I assume Rodolphus saw the chance to finish him off.”

With that she saw Gideon fall back into his chair and calculate his next steps.

“I need a day to prepare,” he said, turning his intent gaze back to Aurora on the sofa. 

“Trust me on this. Tomorrow morning, wake up and tie up any loose ends or outstanding problems. You have been cavalier, but you have achieved more than I thought possible – just wipe away whatever mess you left over the past couple of weeks. Then on Friday, meet me down here at dawn, and we’ll get our justice - for Rupert.”

Aurora watched as he surveyed his whisky cabinet, keeping his voice within the realm of passionless equivocation, ignoring the chance to indulge in emotional rhetoric. She meanwhile, did her best the ease any bubbling sensations of joy. For the time in years, even if qualified with criticism, her father had complimented her. 

His demeanour hadn’t changed however, and it was all business as he asked Aurora, “You weren’t working alone were you?”

Aurora bit her nails. 

The landmine of revealing the role of Laurie, to a man whom had little time for him and probably thought he exercised a touchy-feely pull over her was a particularly difficult one to negotiate. Knowing that she had little choice to be honest, she pulled her hand from her face and said, “Laurie had been helping me.”

To her surprise, her father took this only with a musical murmur of surprise. He rocked back and forth on his chair, probing the matter of Laurie’s reliability in the tide of his thoughts, a habitual trait Aurora had observed whenever he mulled over a big decision.

“Do you think we can rely on him?” queried Gideon.

“I don’t know,” answered Aurora honestly. 

After a pause, he responded, “I leave the decision in your hands Rory”.

He got back off of his chair and strode to the exit, unlocking it with his personalised key. 

Aurora stood up as Gideon made an effort to close their conversation.

“Once this is done,” he announced, “we will speak to Dumbledore together. I want to know everything about the Beaker. It is vital, if we are to get through this, that we understand fully what went on between Rupert and him. Frankly I would also like to ascertain how we can stop these dreams from continuing – only then can we can get the closure we deserve.”

“Closure,” smiled Aurora. 

Her heart fluttered at the thought, a symphony of goodwill eased through her mind at the very suggestion from her father’s words. 

That said, if her father was going to ask what she thought he was going to, the truth was she had no idea whether it would be possible to do as he wished.

Nonetheless, he continued with a formerly lost and strident sense of purpose.

“The conflict has cost us too much, and I am done with the fighting,” he said. “I can understand Rory, if this may sound like a good cause to you, but the sacrifice we have made for our involvement in the past four years is insurmountable. A fool must learn to become wise, and I have learnt that this is a war with a toll and mephitic air that has never been seen before. I want to save us, Rory. Let’s start again. After Rodolphus is dealt with, and after we get the answers we need, I am heading to America. Elizabeth is coming with me, and I want you Aurora, to take the chance of a new life while you can.”

Aurora looked to the floor, uncertain at his request. The idea was so tempting, but it felt like an untouchable paradise, and despite everything that happened, she still thought she could be useful in Britain - saving peoples’ lives. That was what she thought whenever she permitted herself any self-confidence beyond bravado. 

“We can try and rebuild our family,” explained Gideon, ruffling his hair again, “and find a cure for your mother. We can do it in peace: away from all this. Once you have settled your affairs, you could go off and study in Brazil or Australia. Heck, you could even return to China and back to the adventures that allowed you to thrive.”

Aurora could tell her father knew she wasn’t completely convinced, and he added the ominous stick to go with the carrot.

“This war will destroy you, Rory. Or it will take away all the things that define you and make you matter.”

She mulled his words over in her head. 

Aurora was still indecisive on her course of action once Rupert was avenged. She was determined to discover the nature of the orb and its affects, and wouldn’t leave until she was satisfied. Her role in an upcoming full scale war after that however, was not something she could establish in a few fleeting minutes.

Aurora turned to her father and gave the best response she could muster. 

“I will think about it….”

“Good,” said Gideon, “I won’t be home again until Friday morning. Don’t mention our plan to anyone. Knock on the door of my office at six am, with or without Laurie – your choice.”

With that, he gestured for her to leave, explaining that he was off to bed in an hour, but in light of the new developments, had business to attend to first, not furnishing her with any further details.

He had courteously opened the door for her as she left, and through involving her in his plans, she figured he had looked to heal a wound that had festered and grown deeper than the cut on her hip managed. 

They had fallen apart, and though she hadn’t received a hug or a gushing remark, something that she had craved and typically received from her parents growing up, they had given each other purpose. As a family, they were going to track down Rodolphus and do whatever was necessary to get the justice they deserved.

Dumbledore could be damned. The Ministry too - they were no longer of use. This mission was for them- no one else.

However, as she worked herself up into a sense of familial empowerment, she remembered the waning state of her mother, and her father’s words. The nature of her illness and what she had hid from them cut through her like a blade on a bed of thistles. She felt guilty at her lack of understanding, and even guiltier at the rage she now felt from having this kept from her for so long. 

Necessity required her to accept it meekly in the office, but now as the implications of his words dawned on her, Aurora knew that she could not let her mother go quietly into the dying light. 

Aurora, in the flickering light of a sparsely decorated corridor, stood out way as Mardy brushed past her feet, looking to dim the room further in preparation for the emerging night.

Saying goodnight to him, she took the pathway back to the entrance hall. Though rather than retiring to her room, she took the staircase to her left, and ascended into the annexe, to her mother’s wing of the house. 

Here the air was denser, the scent of her mother’s perfume loitered in the corridor to her bedroom whilst, unlike during the day, the closed curtains enveloped the corners of the room in dark shadows. She walked past her dressing room on the right and her diminutive, closet-sized reading room on the left and walked to the door of her room, carefully to keep her footsteps steady and considered on the thick carpet. 

Before she could reach for the handle, her mother’s loyal house elf, Roma, opened the door. Her superior hearing had detected Aurora’s careful movement, and she came greet her at the threshold, with her nose hooked upwards in a sense of suspicion. She hadn’t forgiven Aurora for calling healers to Elizabeth’s room only a week before. 

“Oh it’s you,” Roma wheezed, her voice dripping with condescension.

“Yes, it’s me,” replied Aurora curtly.

She took a cursory glance back at the bedroom she had exited before saying, “I am afraid Mrs Meadows is currently resting right now. Perhaps it would be better for you to wait until the morning.”

“Well, Roma,” answered Aurora in a falsely sweet voice, “it isn’t your place to offer suggestions to me or anyone else in this household. Please leave me to see my mother.”

Roma hesitated, and leant against the door, undecided in how to respond.

Aurora bent down and said, “I order you to move away from the door. If you don’t, I will give you clothes, to dignify the sorry bedsheet you insist upon wearing.”

Roma’s eyes widened, and she quickly sidestepped away from the door, her dainty ears pulled back in alarm.

An indulgent sense of superiority that she was sure to feel an element of guilt over later dictated her next order as she said, “I’d recommend helping Mardy in the kitchen or Bodie, who I think is checking on the bathroom near the attic for mould.”

With that, Roma clicked her fingers with a disapproving tut and vanished. 

Aurora had taken in the house-elf’s scowl with a sigh of her own , before opening the door and entering her mother’s bedroom.

Elizabeth was asleep, her consciousness lost in the tranquil aroma of the rose-scented room. The curtains were closed, and the carpets and cupboards had been officiously cleaned and tidied by her house elf, so that the room had a jarring sense of order to it. No personal effects were notable in the room, and the marigold wallpaper was unbroken in its appearance across all four walls. 

The only exception to this was the music box, resting on the wicker rocking below the window.

She made her across the room, way to her sleeping mother. 

With the exception of her chest, which faintly rose with each of her gentle breaths, she was completely silent. She even slept on her back in a tight upright position, like a hospital patient, and Aurora became acutely aware that her rest was probably potion-induced.

A sense of desperation at her mother’s plight consumed her thoughts as she stroked Elizabeth’s copper coloured hair. She looked no different than before, her mortality and age had instead withered her where it mattered. The woman, youthful looking for someone approaching their fifties, had taken the toll of her years through the suffering of her mind, and however brilliant Aurora was, she knew she was helpless change anything.

All that fuelled her sense of hope therefore, was the music box.

Why it had been left out and why her mother still had it were mysteries to her.

It was purple, tin plated and fairly utilitarian in design and pattern. It was an heirloom, handed down from her long deceased great-grandmother. Though bare in appearance, looking more like a shiny flask or flowerpot than a music box, it was complimented by a wooden handle, which when turned emitted the most soothing of tunes. 

She and Rupert had been comforted on numerous occasions by its s0unds and her mother had used it throughout their childhood to aid their sleep.

Now Aurora watched her mother’s slumber with the instrument in hand, a cruelly created reversal of roles. 

She turned its handle, hoping for its consoling comfort. The recognition of her dreams, and the orb, had occupied her mind with reminders of the off-note piano keys that had greeted her on touching the beaker. The suggestion of a sweeter, softer tone from a more innocent time was a welcoming one.

After she had turned it, there was a pause, before the music though a little quieter and more crackled than she remembered played from the box. The cogs inside the purple case whirred to create the sounds.

Resting on the wicker chair, she softly pushed the chair back and forth, and took her body to rest under the sounds of the music.

“Goodnight mum,” Aurora whispered, as she closed her eyes.


	17. Phantoms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora finds herself in the bewildering chaos of her dreams, echoing with ghosts, peculiar visions and the sins of souls from the past. All the while, reminders of her own life, and the rising of the darkest wizard of all time linger at the back of her mind.

Lucid, fervent fumes spiralled into the midnight sky, reaching for the starry netherworld that transcended her pitiful mortality.

Aurora watched on as the ethereal, nocturnal aspirations of the travelling crowd nearby were characterised by the roar of campfire flames, which enlivened the flowering spring meadow with a jubilant sense of accomplishment.

For reasons beyond her understanding, she was consumed with a spiritual satisfaction and a radiating sagacity of contentment, keeping her at startling ease. 

Her focus however, was on the world beyond the meadow.

Remarkably, despite its distance from the soil beneath her feet, a comet, still thousands of miles away, was exposed to her naked vision and was tangibly fizzing through the atmosphere. 

Overwhelmed by its sight, Aurora fell to her knees, muddying the lace of her sweeping white dress. Following its flight she saw that it was a mere solitary ornament in a euphoric melancholy of moons and planets. They were a miasma of rapturous joy, coloured a rainbow of hues and adorned with belts of asteroid that twinkled like stars. More poignantly, an entrancing aurora laminated the clouds below them with a haunting green radiance. 

Only the touch of another soul could take her away from the hypnotic awe and unyielding scope of the beautiful cosmos. 

A warm, convivial hand clasped her wrist, its bracelets of twined twigs brushing against her forearm. She looked down, though still up, and saw a woman, with shimmering auburn hair and clothed in a vapour blue dress and knotted broach smile at her, exposing her glisteningly white teeth as she did so. Without hesitation she pulled Aurora into a standing position and studied her clothes, examining her head to toe.

“Oh, what have you done to your dress?” she teased playfully. 

With a click of her fingers, that were adorned with a series of a gold and ruby rings, and a shake of her bare arms, that were stained by a mesmeric bacchanal of tattoos including an orchard of yellow roses that ran up to her right shoulder, she cleansed the dirt off of Aurora’s attires.

“I wouldn’t look at the stars so often if I were you,” she then warned.

Her honeyed tones and ingratiating balms remained through every breath of her spoken word but they were betrayed by the ferocity of her eyes, which purple in colour, dictated the modicum of her misgivings.

There was something off, Aurora realised, about how she communicated. It was when the woman spoke again that she realised what it was.

“You see,” she continued, gesturing to the plethora of tables and tents cluttering their surroundings, “we’re used to the capricious nature of our night time illusions. Sadly, it isn’t so easy for those less familiar to be ensued by the gathering beauty of our realm. The sky really places its footsteps in the histories of your retinas if you aren’t too careful and one finds it hard to linger their mind on much else.”

As the woman spoke Aurora felt every word echo, almost musically, through the recesses of her cognizance. Her skull vibrated, evoked into a jarring reaction as the woman crafted sentences that seemed to carve through the smoky atmosphere of the field. 

“Meridia,” called a voice from a table nearby, with an accent ringing and cut-glass, but husky in its iterations “are you coming back to enjoy the wonders of our season?”

“Soon,” said the woman, turning to the calling female who Aurora now saw was a little stout lady with frazzled hair.

“Good,” the frazzle hair lady replied, “and bring our new friend with you.”

She gave Aurora a cheery wave before returning to conversation with a conglomerate of other women on her bench.

Aurora took the chance to take in her more immediate surroundings.

The meadow was littered with wildflowers, and knots of grass and the occasional eruption of mushroom or unorthodox faunae. The grounds were brightened by the delirium of the sky above and by a sparing selection of torches that floated in mid-air and followed people at the peripheries of the party to aid their ventures from the beaten path. There were perhaps a dozen tables in total, with an anthropomorphic menagerie of guests nestled on every bench. Families were in attendance, happily chewing away on bread and a cornucopia of fruit whose variety of colour almost matched the ecstasy of the sky above them. They were chatting, unusually in modern English that her ears could decipher, despite their tenth century garb. The men wore linen tunics, and silk cloaks, the sporadic coat covering the less celebratory. Their outfits often adored with weaponry which they duly used for cutting the hunks of food for the feast. The women meanwhile all wore dresses, similar to the one wrapped around Aurora’s blemished frame. 

A lyrist added a sonic dimension to the affair, sitting on a log, its beats conducting the rapid flow of conversation. Grey-haired and wiry, Aurora found her presence to be oddly familiar, but before she could really deliberate the matter, she was distracted the sizzling of meat. Across the field, a few men stood over a roasting hog, its delicious odours lost to the fumes of the monstrous campfire nearby. They were waiting to serve the main meal, as the finicky tones of the lyre motivated a few to gather away from the tables and dance to the music.

A handful of youngsters ran around, let loose from the pack, buzzing like enthused bees as they mingled near the open tents, gleefully whooping as they revelled in their child-like games. 

Aurora meanwhile, though part of the celebrations, didn’t have a table and until Meridia had just found her, she imagined she must have been standing alone, though she had no recollection why that was.

“I like what they did with your hair,” mused Meridia.

She was gleefully fondling the plat running down Aurora’s left cheek. Meridia’s fingers; warm and temptingly smooth, rubbed against her face, and she felt them brush against a glittery powder that had been dashed across her own eyelids. Her nails teased contact with her lips, which she now realised had been painted and coloured. Memory told her that she had been festooned in such a way when her hair had been ordered. For some reason her hair was tied at the back with a copper link, into a thick tail with wavy strands running down her shoulders, whilst the fringe had been turned into thinner plats at the front. 

Meridia’s hairstyle was of a freer variety, but no less fastidiously tended to. 

“Should we go back to the tables?” said Aurora, still confused by the surrealistic fingerprints of their conversation.

“In a bit,” frisked Meridia, “but I have something to show you first.”

Taking hold of Aurora’s wrist once again, she pulled her through the assortment of tables and chairs. The forty or so gathered people all smiled at her as she passed them. Her strides felt lighter than usual, and when she looked down, she saw she was barefooted, as was Meridia. 

Her movement was interrupted by a small child who took hold of the hems of Aurora’s dress and gave them an excited tug, drawing her attention.

“Yes?” said Aurora, stopping.

Meridia was beaming at the child. 

It was a girl, perhaps only six years old, whose smile was curved to the point of caricature, with honey coloured hair and eyes like saucers that absorbed Aurora’s attention, so fixated were they on every tremor of movement she evoked. 

Aurora recognised her from somewhere, though she couldn’t place where.

In the girl’s hands were two flowery crowns, made of moss and reeds of grass with daffodil head crests. She gave Aurora’s dress another tug before holding the circlets aloft. 

“Why thank you Ariel,” said Meridia, continuing to beam, her complimentary tone ascending her voice half an octave. 

She took the crowns from the girl’s outstretched hands. She placed one on her own head and the other on Aurora’s. The girl meanwhile scurried back to the party, following the voices of the children who were now playing tag by the benches.

“She is so lovely, that girl, soon to be an enchantress if rumours are true,” explained Meridia.

Aurora nodded, unsure what to say. The words and actions of everyone around her had felt so abrupt, the faces of those talking to her appearing almost out of the rain.

Meridia continued, “We had a great success today, one that even Barnabus can’t hide his delight from. Our people are right to be so joyous.”

Then, impulse appeared to take over her soporific demeanour as she looked up at the sky and bellowed, “Oh I must tell someone!”

With a cackle of laughter and with her disposition erratic once more, shadows forming below her eyebrows, said in a whisper, “I have some wonderful news, but I think you are the only one I can trust with it.”

She ran her fingers between the grooves of Aurora’s hand. Then, armed with another reassuring smile, she gently positioned Aurora’s palm against her stomach.

Aurora, felt the flesh of Meridia’s abdomen and realised a gentle bump had formed below her waist. After a moment’s pause, she felt a timorous kick vibrate against her finger and shudder up her hand.

“It’s real,” said Meridia delightedly, “it finally happened. Oh Aurora, I have been blessed with a gift.”

“Congratulations,” Aurora replied.

“Oh that is sweet of you,” cooed Meridia, and then cupping her hand over Aurora’s ear so that all she could hear was the swirling echo of trapped air, she said, “Don’t tell anyone yet, I am not sure how I intend to break the news.”

After Aurora agreed, Meridia said, “Now, to what I was here to originally show you.”

They strode further from the party, until the benches were beyond Aurora’s vision and the fire merely a red, bilious expression on the horizon. It was when taking this in that Aurora saw there was no real prospect beyond the myopic gathering behind her. Sure, the sky remained as tantalising and as humbling as ever, and the meadow existed, but past the foreground, and in the firmament not directly above her head, there was only blackness. Not darkness, but a solid blackness, like a thick wall that dammed the flow of the surrounding area with their own community. It was as if their world had been plucked from the ground and left to exist in solitude. 

She also observed that the line of empty tents to the side of the benches had continued with every step they had taken. Following them like a corridor, she realised that each had a number, and now they stood by tent number three hundred and four. The following torch crackled as it burnt through the wax, continuing to guide their route.

“No time for dilly-dallying,” said Meridia, “only another hundred or so tents to go.”  
They marched on, until they reached tent number four hundred and thirteen, where a wooden signpost protruded from the ground. The faunae and growth of wildlife had abandoned their travels soon after they left the campfire, and the walk had been a little monotonous. Aurora had panicked somewhat, thinking they were in an endless maze or lost in cognitive limbo that had marooned them in the most isolating remnants of her subconscious. 

Meridia however, pointed at the sign and said, “Well Wavelock is to the left, we don’t want to go home just yet, nor do we want stead at Haven’s Lake. I don’t think we have much interest in the Cemetery, but knowing her, I reckon that’s where her tent is.” 

They had been at a crossroads. The grassy path split into four, with definitive boundaries composing of a nihilistic abyss each side of the road. 

The directions to the cemetery took them straight on and a numbing gap, with no tents to be found, traced their path. Eventually the torch burnt out and in response, Meridia’s eyes lit up in a bronze bedlam of colour that guided their footsteps. 

Reassuring Aurora with a firm grip of her hand she took her on until eventually a solitary tent appeared, almost forming from the earth, accompanied by an empty wagon which had the word “Devour” painted on its side. 

An icy maned horse, with a see-through hide, so that its organs were visible and its bones as plain as day, nestled on the ground by one of its large wooden wheels

Tending to the horse was a shirtless man with a sculpted torso of muscular sinew. Wearing sack cloth trousers and inked with a collection of red fiery tattoos, he sat cross legged on the ground, eating the grass alongside his chomping steed.

As Meridia approached, he abruptly paused his feast and looked past her gaze and said to Aurora, locking eyes with her, “You want to visit the fair seer, but I’d advise you not to.”

He gestured to the tent nearby, which Aurora now saw was labelled four hundred and fourteen by a picket in the ground.

Meridia countered his folkloric drawl with words of her own, “Always good to be concerned honourable Bard, but she is going in with me. I’d keep the worst of it away for sure.”

He scrutinised Aurora, who trembled at the ferocity of his examination, before setting his sights back to Meridia.

“Very well,” he muttered, “but keep her safe in there, it’s not somewhere mortals should linger.”

“I will,” said Meridia. 

He returned to scooping up grass with his equine companion. Meridia directed Aurora to the open veil of the tent.

Unlike the others, which had been maroon clones of each other, composed of a triangular design and bare, like ordered boxes on company shelves, this tent was circular and significantly larger, and made entirely of a thin, white fabric seemingly identical to that of Aurora’s dress.

The entrance echoed the sound of rushing air, like a conch at the seaside, giving a ghostly shimmer to the threshold. 

Undeterred, Aurora went to push the veil across and enter within. Meridia however stopped her, taking hold of the veil, and said, in a voice with a returning element of forewarning, “This is a worrisome place I am asking you to enter. I doubt you have any true reason to trust me, but I assure you, I am doing this to give you the strength that you so sorely need.”

She put her hand, so invitingly warm on Aurora’s shoulder and said, “We are blood after all. Centuries don’t change that reality.”

Then, with a gentle push, Meridia took Aurora beyond the veil of the tent. Confused by her words, Aurora offered no retort and found herself in an enclosed space that was seemingly void of any detail. 

Only darkness, comparable to that found in the dreams of days past was comparable to the vision in front of her.

Aurora turned back to leave, hoping to at least be reassured by the presence of an exit, however, the veil they had entered from had disappeared from sight and all that encompassed her surrounding was a dense blackness, lit by a crystal ball that rested on a solitary round table in front of her. 

With an element of panic she turned to Meridia, who reassured her saying, “It’s alright, trust me. The ground is safe to tread here.”

As she tread through the darkness, feeling the firm touch of a grassy meadow beneath her feet but only spying dark matter in its place, she noticed that propped up on a chair, at the opposite end of the table was a skeleton, of spotless bone – the hollows of its eyes illuminated in the glow of the ball.

Tentatively, Aurora stepped back, before Meridia grabbed her arm and whispered soothingly, “It’s ok, I promise.”

With Aurora in tow, Meridia moved towards the table. It was made of stone, but blank of markings or carvings. The crystal ball rested on its surface in the middle, between two chairs, one empty, and the other occupied by the corpse. 

The room echoed a gentle aroma of elderflowers and honey but also smelt of freshly printed books, baked cakes, galleon coins, dragon fire, scorpion tonic, and the musk of his hair. 

Aurora realised these were her favourite scents, collected from her memories and imprinted into the room like a presentation from a scrapbook. 

Ignoring its eerie similarity to the vampires and their business charmers, she made no effort to resist as Meridia helped her in to the empty chair before stepping a foot back, resting her arm on Aurora’s shoulder.

Then, the skeleton began to tremble, its fingers flickered with movement, and its neck, drooped against the rib cage, craned upwards, the gaps of its eyes locking with Aurora’s, its gaze so disarming that she found herself unable to move.

A voice reverberated across the void, its ghostly resonance causing vibrations on table top, the crystal ball, initially clear, filled with a coarse vapour.

“Thank you, Meridia,” it said, “I knew I could trust my daughter to find our ancestor.”

Aurora looked at the skeleton; the sounds weren’t coming from its mouth, which remained closed, the hollow jawline firmly shut. However, as the voice, which Aurora deduced was female, continued to speak, the skeleton, as if directed by a concealed puppeteer moved from a slouched position to an upright one. 

“Now,” continued the voice, “I need to speak to her alone.”

Meridia nodded, and releasing Aurora’s shoulder, said, “Thank you mother.”

Before Aurora could react, Meridia disappeared from view, evidence of her appearance in the void disappearing with it.

The skeleton pointed at the orb, causing the patterns of mist to swirl within the glass.

“I took you from conventional sleep, blood-kind,” said the voice, “I apologise for my directness, but you are our only chance in this hour of need.”

“What are you?” splurted Aurora, before pausing and reframing her question to the skeletal figure, “Who are you?”

“Who am I? Some call me the Seer, for I do prophesise and observe. I understand the deepest worlds, those of our own minds, better than any. Frankly though, you can call me Betty for all I care, but it’d be more apt to give me no name whatsoever. As for what I am, I am an echo, a memory of what I was, imprinted within your blood, within the Nelson blood, my descendants. Open to you as you sleep and aware of you since the Darkest Lord set his sights on what you know as Ariel’s Beaker.” 

“I am not the body, it is only the instrument I conduct for using the orb,” said the voice amused, breaking through the nothingness as Aurora had leant in, studying the skeleton posed across the table from her.

“What is this place?” said Aurora finally.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it is actually pretty hard to say.”

 

“I could always just ask Meridia.”

“Maybe, but her palettes of responses are finite and limited. Sadly my daughter is long dead. All you are engaging with are the reflections I have of her. The very construct you arrived in was merely the framework of a memory.”

“Meaning?”

“What you see are projections from a sad tale, and the foolish attempts to repeat the worst excesses of humanity, which linger in here long after as a consequence.”

“You could be more specific, you know.”

“I could be, however I am not here to reveal old secrets, I am here to give you the power to save your world. In exchange you will destroy our world. It is what needs to be done.”

“Knowledge is power you know,” scoffed Aurora wryly, “I mean you could explain what your world is? Or maybe try explaining why Voldemort wants an old artefact, and why my brother and I have had such similar encounters with freaks since we heard tell of it would be quite empowering.”

“Hold still,” said the voice, ignoring her protests.

Before Aurora could offer any retort, green vines emerged from the nothingness below her feet, twisting and writing around the stone table on impact with its surface. The skeleton creaked forwards in its chair and prodded a slithering strand of plant, and a yellow rose bud popped out from the stem. Within seconds, yellow roses emerged across the entire tapestry of stems as the plant wrapped itself around the entire table leaving only the orb, which now glowing, visible for Aurora to see. Then, the plant, after firmly coating the table grew no more.

Aurora waited, with baited breath, for the voice to return into the tent, unsure what the “Hold Still” had been referring to. 

Instead a second set of climbing flowers emerged out of the void, in this time appearing behind the chair. Like Devil’s Snare, it had no interest in the furniture and instead tightened around her ankle. Aurora tried to fight it off, kicking at the air, but the rope-like vine tightened and thick knots followed wrapping the secured ankle around the leg of the chair. Aurora reached into her dress, looking for her wand, but failing to find one. She reached for a spell, and realised she could no longer remember any.

Consumed by panic, she screamed, “What are you doing to me!”

She shouted into the void, the voice didn’t reply.

Aurora tried to reach down and manually untie the horticultural cords, but within moments dense webs flew across her chest, and pinned her back against the chair, wrapping around her chest. She writhed and struggled, but they secured her trunk against the wooden back of the chair, the supports pressing into her flesh. 

She pulled at the vines with her hands but as a wave of plant, now adorned in yellow rose, restrained her other ankle, thick lines fell across her wirsts, tying them down to the armrests of her chair.

As Aurora sat, immobilised, grunting and whining at her bonds, the plant continued to slither across her chair, making her restraints more elaborate until she could barely move and that the chair was merely a throne of rose flowers. Only her head, with its dandelion crown remained untouched.

“What is this, you witch?” moaned Aurora, wriggling to no avail

Then the ball glowed a shimmering blue, in a fashion identical to the orbs of Ariel’s beaker. 

The skeleton reclined back in its chair, whilst the voice continued to ignore Aurora’s protests.

As she thought of ways to escape the clutches of the plant, of a haunting yellow hue she had seen before, a presence swept through her mind. 

She tried to resist, screwing her eyes shut as the pressure built within her skill, but within moments it swept through her barriers, grasping hold of the recesses of her mind with a power and cognisance that Aurora had never experienced before. It was searching for her memories, grasping them like a bear fishing for salmon. Visions of her childhood flashed before Aurora’s eyes. She saw herself playing in the orchard with her brother, she saw herself using magic for the first time when she charmed a songbird to flutter behind her and sing into her ears, and she even recollected a trip to the beach with her mother collecting seashells. Scrutinising the archives of her identity it brought sadder memories, such as of her grandparents’ deaths, of crying at Hogwarts on her first day or the time she had her photo album stolen by Third Years a week later as someone distracted her by reading out her letters from home to everyone in her class. Then, memories of a deeper, morose nature appeared in Aurora’s mind eye.

“No, get out of those!” cried Aurora.

It was analysing her tears over Laurie, her fall from grace in her father’s eyes, the void left by her mother’s continued ill health, the trauma of a Lethifold attack in China, and lastly, her brother’s death. The one event that truly sickened her and racked her conscience with everlasting guilt.

“You have suffered,” said the voice, reaching out across the room, as the presence withdrew from her mind.

“Let go of me!” said Aurora, yanking at the arms of her chair.

“You have had many days of hurt. Yet you are strong, determined, inventive, powerful, and with a wit and wisdom beyond measure. Your agency, and your ancestry serves you well.”

“I don’t serve, and I don’t judge virtue on blood,” growled Aurora, trying to rock the chair but finding the plants had buttressed it firmly in place. 

“Nor do I. I value you, because you are our last hope. The Darkest of Wizards wants Ariel’s Beaker, Aurora. He craves and desires it whole. That doesn’t worry me. It should worry you however, if you knew what he could achieve with it?

“But I don’t! What does the blasted thing even do?” said Aurora, “What compels you to the point you take me like this?”

“It cannot be told, only learned. Albus knew that above all others. He went looking for it, and knowing your relation to the artefact and your brother’s virtue, he sent Rupert to find hidden orb, knowing the Darkest of Wizards already had a headstart on the chief artefact itself. With our help, Rupert found what he was looking for. We instructed him in his sleep for weeks.”

“Uh-huh, and why did he leave home, and why did he die?”

“There are more apparitions in here than just useful allies. Ariel’s tragedy is a dark one, as is the tales of all others who have happened to wish to use the Beaker for themselves. The Darkest of Wizards doesn’t worry me for that reason. The hauntings however, have gained control of this realm, and their intoxication of the relic terrifies me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Only what I said.”

“If you killed my brother….if you were responsible in any way….I’ll….I’ll”

“Kill me? I am already dead. I didn’t lay a finger to your brother, we were overpowered by those seeking to destroy him. In payment for that, I am here to empower you, with the weapons needed to fight the worst of Ariel’s Beaker, and to save your world from the power of Lord Voldemort.”

“Bite me.”

“Oh I will.”

At that moment, another vine of roses emerged from the ground. It hovered in front of Aurora’ chair, this time appearing from above.

“Barnabus sends his regards by the way,” said Aurora thinking of her former night-time illusion.

“A sweet taunt, pet,” said the voice. 

The skeleton jolted back into life. With an outstretched hand, it turned its bare thumb downwards and against her will, Aurora felt her jaw drop open like a hinge.

Then with a bustling, snake-like hiss, the plant shot through the gap into her mouth. Rather than suffocating on the odourless flowers, they disappeared on contact with her tongue.

A second later, the suppressive orchard of plant life dropped from her limbs and crumbled away into nothingness.

“What power did you give me? Why did you do that?” growled Aurora rubbing her wrists in complaint, both fearful and filled with stung pride.

“You’ll see,” said the voice, “in time.”

As Aurora made to get up off the chair, a pair of orange, glistening eyes caught her eye, visible across the void laid in front of her.

Though she could tell the figure was stumbling, the height of the eyes off the ground varying with each step, it was moving at a remarkable pace soon only feet from the table.

Illuminated by the glow of the orb, Aurora saw it was a child. The child.

Not the affectionate blonde haired girl with the smile.

Instead, it was the other child. From Barnabus’ recollection, the murdered child. Killed by Meridia.

“You can see something, can’t you?” said the voice, a vestige of fear creeping into its words. 

“Yes,” said Aurora trembling, it was coming towards her, with trembling baby steps, and a large, sinister knife in her hands. 

“I am afraid there is little I can do,” said the voice.

The child then clambered onto the table.

It swiftly beheaded the skeleton with the knife, before turning its attention on Aurora. 

Its face was that of a young infant, though ravaged with scars and cuts, and a gaping hole to the left of its neck, where as it smiled, a feast of maggots, caked in blood seeped from the wound. As it savoured the palpable look of terror in Aurora’s face, the naked infant, still reeking of rotten wood and burnt candle wick, held its knife aloft, and stabbed through the orb, smashing it to smithereens. The void went pitch black, illuminated only by the orange glow of the girl’s eyes, and the sounds of its straggly hair knocking against the handle of the blade, as it stumbled over to Aurora’s seat.

Petrified, Aurora sat paralysed, unable to move. 

“Aurora,” called a different voice from behind her.

It was Meridia, now garbed in dark robes, with a face etched with scorn and fury, a purple gemstone floated above her head, lighting her auburn hair. She seemed to have materialised from nowhere.

“I can sense it, don’t worry,” she said.

Then, standing in the void, cursed fire shot from her fingertips, smothering the table in nauseously vehement green fumes. 

The demonic child, wielding the baleful blade, stumbled in the heat, giving enough of a delay as Aurora felt Meridia grab hold of her wrist and pull her away from the table, the chair sinking into a black hole beneath her feet. 

“How did you know to come when you did?” asked Aurora, eyes still fixed on the struggling infant, writhing in the flames, its troubled shadow echoed against the green light. 

It may have been some sort of ghastly incarnation, but a child, even noiselessly and painlessly, being beaten down in caustic flame was difficult to observe without any humane instinct of wanting to save it from the crippling heat. 

Aurora was struggling maintain her vision, the intensity of the fire was tremendous to the point the heat, magnified by the void of the tent, started to pain her eyes.

Meridia gave her another tug, “There’s no time to explain. Trust me, if that thing touches you then you will be cursed. Cursed to live like we do, trapped within memories, trapped within the Beaker.”

Meridia fired another spell into the void with her left hand, auburn hair billowing from the rush of her craft.

A hole appeared in the listless darkness, exposing the grassy banks outside the tent.

“Come on, through here!” she screamed.

Aurora had no time to ask any further questions, instead only feeling her body shift through the gap. 

Then, they ran.

They ran for seemingly miles, the ground becoming a blur, with Aurora only having time to look up and to see the delirium of moons and stars had disappeared, replaced by a bilious blanket of cloud. The horse and cart meanwhile, with the enigmatic driver, were nowhere to be seen.

Meridia kept going, Aurora in tow, until they reached a stone wall and an iron gate, with a banner lined above the entrance saying “CEMETERY”.

“Here,” said Meridia, stopping by the entrance. 

“Now listen,” she continued, pointing her finger at Aurora, “this cemetery will take you to a portal, it’s your way out. Just stay on the path, the grass in there is toxic, if you touch the blades or inhale the fumes you won’t awake. They are the essence of deep sleep. I need you to take this.”

“Meridia I don’t even….understand what you are…”

“I know,” said Meridia exasperated, “I know, I know, I know! But now isn’t the time to explain. If you’re seeing those damned monsters already, then we really are running out of options fast, they could be here any minute. Thankfully they can’t follow you through the gate.” 

Aurora hesitated, forcing Meridia to add, with an element of fluster, “They are people who tried to use the Beaker for their own purposes but failed in their ambitions. Throughout history there have been several, and they all reaped the consequences. It is dangerous to experiment with magic after now. What you are seeing is imprints of them. Your awakening however, when you touched the orbs in that store, has given them an impetus to find a way out.”

“Out of where? Where even are we?”

“It doesn’t matter, just don’t let them touch you, ever, ok?”

Aurora nodded, before reluctantly accepting a piece of fruit that Meridia took out from the hems of her dress, magenta in colour and sort of similar in resemblance to a plum. 

“A lumaberry,” explained Meridia, “the antidote to the grass blades, eat it.”

She duly obliged, whilst Meridia nervously looked behind her, apprehensive.

Aurora shuddered, the thumping of a limb hitting the ground radiated through her ear.

“I felt that too,” said Meridia, “I can’t see them, I can only sense them up close. So tell me Aurora, is there anything coming towards us, out in the distance?”

It was close.

Only ten feet away. 

The child, blood seeping from its neck, was staggering towards them, ghostly white, its demented eyes boring into Aurora’s. Every few steps it was stumbling on the ground, letting out a girlish giggle each time she fell – the noise that had brought her to Meridia’s attention.

“It’s her,” said Aurora.

“Go then,” screamed Meridia, “now!”

Meridia took hold of Aurora’s arm and threw her through the gate, which opened before her body made contact with it.

It closed behind her as she stumbled across the entrance stopping the momentum of her footsteps just in time. 

She hovered momentarily over the stone decking that cushioned the entry into the clearing. Though it was a door of bare steel, she could no longer see through to Meridia and the tent of the seer instead, finding the plain in front of her closed off, smothered in a dark blanket of nothingness. 

To Aurora, it seemed that a gauntlet of subnormal absurdity languished across the pathway home. 

Two hundred feet away, an Olympian breath from the stone steps stood the portal. It was a noiseless, rippling layer of blue that intermittently shimmered like a skipping stone on a mountain lake. It was formed across an archway, consisting of a similar design to the gate, made of iron, and on a boulder plinth set above the sinister blades of grass. The yellow pasture Meridia had warned of was very much prominent. More interestingly, as if existing in a mirror, two graves protruded from the clearing on both sides. 

Both graves on the left were identical to those on the right, and vice versa. They were lichen covered and of mouldy pebbledash finish. Aurora could discern however, that one said, “Devour” in place of a name, whilst the other said “Desire”. 

More optically compelling was that graves on the left read from left to right whilst those on the right seemed to be merely a reflection. 

The graves were attended to by a similarly confusing pair of women. They were impeccably dressed identical twins, garbed in pristine suits and boater hats, and stood comfortably on the reeds of yellow grass. The poisonous tips near their ankles had gleefully absorbed the fabric of their trouser legs and the skin bare above their socks, but to no avail. The twins were utterly unmoved by the vicious sentience of the plants. They were also unaffected by the colourless haze of stupefication that emanated from the roots of the earth, which would duly have incapacitated Aurora without the gift of Meridia’s charm. Their reflected pairing on the right was equally untroubled.

Like with the graves, for all Aurora knew, they were a solitary pair, somehow mirrored or duplicated across on either the left of the right of her, in a guise that she was utterly unable to decipher. 

One of the women was smoking on a pipe, sucking in its burning vapours. The stench of brimstone clung to the air, causing Aurora to sneeze, her nostrils irritated by its abrasive complexion. The other woman, watched over by the pipe smoker, was armed with a shovel, attempting to dig into the ground by the graves.

With a gulp, Aurora tried her best to stick to the stepping stones that cut through the middle of the clearing. She avoided the intrusive grass, and followed it along to the portal.

Halfway there, the women paused from their digging. 

“Do you think it would be jolly to go and say hello,” said the digger, setting to the earth once more with his shovel but merely creating an indent in the turf, the grass scuffing under his blade instead.

She was stabbing at the ground with her equipment, using it like a syringe rather than in the fashion of any sort of garden implement that Aurora was aware of.

The purple handle shimmered on contact with the floor and the sound of a piano key ruminated through the clearing, echoing in Aurora’s skull like Meridia’s voice. 

“To whom, Mrs Marchbanks?” asked the other, fiddling with her boater hat. 

“No, to the girl,” said the digger, gesturing with her neck to where Aurora was walking, so slowly now that her pace had almost diffused to a stop. 

“That mortal one, do you mean? The Nelson blood-daughter from the midnight ramblings of that plagued nobleman up the road?” said the surveying twin. 

“You should know,” joked the digger, stabbing at the flat ground once more, “he is that poor fellow you continue to tease.” 

“True. Is the tonic not working?” asked the other. 

“I wouldn’t be able to say,” mused the digging twin, “as he finds the concept of prescribed medication to be ah, disagreeable.”

“Hmm…yes,” laughed the other after a hesitant pause.

Aurora wanted to keep moving on, and to avoid the meandering alleyway of their conversations but found herself compelled to stay on the spot, marooned on a stepping stone in the middle of the clearing in naked view of the twins each side.

The actions and words of the twins were copied on both sides. 

“Well, our fateful friend is wants to go home, she is hoping to walk away as we speak, are you sure we’re supposed to be this rude?” inquired the digger. 

Aurora gulped, her chest quivered. She was uncertain, unsure of whether they were a threat, but instinct chained her to the spot. An emanating thought powered her decision making, for some reason she knew that she needed to hear what they had to say. 

“You could at least help with the digging,” said the digging woman, after the other gave no response.

“No, I knew your plan wouldn’t work,” sneered the other.

“My plan?” said the digging twin. 

They continued with their backs to Aurora, and engaged in a rapid fire repartee that she found difficult to keep up with, even in this transient state. 

“Yes, your plan. I told you I didn’t believe in the project?”

“The digging?”

“No, I imagine that is wonderful fun. I mean the entire thought experiment.”

“Oh I see.” 

“Why don’t you ask her to help?”

“She doesn’t dig,”

“She doesn’t DIG?” 

“No, she DOESN’T dig,”

”Oh, sorry, I understand you now.”

“Very well, pip pip and all that,” concluded the digger, addressing Aurora for the first time, and finally breaking through the grass with his shovel. 

The sound of a piano ruminated through the surroundings once more, on this occasion permeating the atmosphere for several seconds. Deep in tone, it felt more foreboding than the stroking of notes that Aurora had heard before.

As they regained focus on whatever labour they were undertaking, Aurora found a will to leave, and followed the stepping stones for a while longer until she reached the portal. 

She climbed the steps with no drama, and found the portal stoically silent. Its frame was unmarked, and little could be gaged from examining it.

Instead, as if diving into a pool, she soared through the archway. She went in face first, arms aloft for impact, passing through the mystical void.


	18. Trauma

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora looks for Laurie in Diagon Alley, having returned from the most unusual of dreams. Crucial decisions have to be made.

As soon as her face had passed through the portal, she had woken up in the rocking chair, gasping and retching in fright.

Dawn had broken, and the musical cooing of birdsong accompanied the return to her senses.

Mardy had loomed by her shoulder with a lantern, confused by her behaviour. After dismissing the curious servant from the scene, she took in the utilitarian but familiar surroundings of her mother’s room with tangible relief. Aurora felt no urge for any further slumber.

Her mother had remained unconscious, in a potion-induced trance.

Aurora had kissed her farewell, hoping the raw expression of her love may have stymied her medically induced trance. The fever however, wouldn’t break with her touch, and despite whatever infantile fantasies she entertained, there was no way her mother knew she was there. Aurora was aware that if Friday didn’t go well, she might never see her again.

As a solitary tear ruptured her determined visage, she had left the house – ready for what the day would bring. 

Now, hours later, she was walking through Diagon Alley on a bleak, remorseless Thursday evening.

She was thinking about how she had left that vision, her initial reminiscence whilst reflecting on the day that had passed.

The oft-stated saying, of only remembering the dreams you woke up in the middle of, seemed markedly apt. In Aurora’s case, it was consequently startling to her that she remembered every step and movement of her night-time vision in vivid detail. Making sense of it, and judging its credibility however, was a far trickier task. 

She had been blessed with a power, apparently. 

Whatever the case, this wasn’t the first time her memories had been haunted by supernatural shadows, and now she had to remain on guard. 

Rupert’s illustrations had exposed a crumbling mind. A dissipated creative beauty brought low by the demons of his dreams. His dreams had been so similar to Aurora’s, including identical characters and references to the same artefact. Since contact with the beaker, these imaginings had plagued her stream of thoughts, which had done enough to deteriorate the conviction of her morally superior brother. Aurora loathed admitting it, but she was too afraid to comprehend what they meant- even if her brain kept racing back to them.

Dumbledore had let her down. Still to this point, he had not contacted her since the hospital wing. The macabre debacle of the Resistance, and his relationship with Rupert, needed answering for.

Though she had found difficult, she did her best to swat away the fear and toxic intrigue of her illusions. Even if, as she now knew, that Rupert had worked with Dumbledore, and that the beaker had been his focus, bringing his killer to justice had to be what devoted her time. It was selfish to think otherwise, to understand the whys and wherefores of Rupert’s life would only indulge her senses of closure now that he was dead.

Thus Aurora had spent Thursday tying off loose ends, largely in Diagon Alley. Empowered by his promise of her father’s support tomorrow, she had set to her tasks that day with an element of unexpected relish. First off, she had gone to Gringotts and checked her finances, securing her expedition pay from China so that it was available to spend in case of an emergency. Then Aurora had whiled away a good few hours looking to establish whether she still had a tail. 

Unfortunately the evidence was inconclusive. She had spied one of her father’s friends from the funeral, Dedalus Diggle, taking a partially similar route to her near Flourish and Blotts, but couldn’t discern if it was coincidental or an dawdling effort of espionage. Gorgeous George’s men, however, wherever they were, remained markedly quiet. No snatchers dogged her tracks either. This was probably because Greyback was awaiting the final verdict on his sentence tomorrow, and therefore was not at liberty to double their pay.

Hagrid had also come out of Knockturn Alley around mid-afternoon, a sack of odious animal feed under one of his burly arms, but Aurora darted from view as soon as she glimpsed his jolly figure. She did this not out of spite, but because she couldn’t allow anyone with associations to Dumbledore to track her movement. It pained her to avoid friends, and it was symptomatic of a society on the brink of war, but she knew it was necessary.

Aurora had also looked for any hints of irregularities outside the Ministry, but aside from the now routine heavy security presence dogging the entrances, all appeared well.

To drain her time until late evening, when Laurie finished his shift at the Leaky Cauldron, she had ventured from the magical realm to the commonly tread streets of muggle London. In an effort to create some relief, whilst remaining appropriately on edge for her task the next day, she had spent the past hour wallowing in the mundane. 

She had gone to a pub near Wimbledon, and had found herself oddly involved and at ease with the muggle conversations around her, and with a world still not overly different to the one she had studied as a child other than their now wacky attire. After deciding that she had passively inhaled enough tobacco fumes, she had ventured off to a local library, of impressive size even if it had existed in the Wizarding World, and had lost herself in an encyclopaedic tome on maritime life in the South China Sea. Even when her mind was turbulently battling against the conflicts closer to home, she couldn’t help but find the book utterly fascinating, reading the reference piece like a holiday paperback. 

When eight o’clock struck, she had reluctantly returned to the dirge of her mystical reality. 

The top half of Diagon Alley, where Aurora had treaded earlier that day, had been returned to its former ramshackle splendour, repaired from the flame and ruin of the Vigiliant. Were it not for being there at the time, she would have found no suggestion of ever such a riot taking place. The Prophet had barely covered it, the story existing merely in the ropey annals of hearsay, to the point she even heard some stragglers near Quality Quidditch Supplies adamantly tell any passer-by who cared to stop that it was a griffin attack, all to be explained in the next Quibbler. 

In fact, it looked as if nothing had changed. Except for the fact it was now closed off in the evenings - guarded by a phalanx of Ministry officials.

The people, if a homogenised term could be excused, acted the same as they had the day she had first discovered the beaker, though perhaps only a little terser than they were before. The crowds remained hushed but commuters had continued to use it as a passage of safety. The shops’ business continued to be hurried, and the Ministry had, according to what she had overheard, decided against searching everyone entering the alleyway on practicality grounds and out of a desire not to cause panic. Those had been the grumbling word of one Ministry worker passing through. Aurora had also not seen any sanctimonious preachers this time around, perhaps warded off by the bloodshed weeks ago.

Minutes before, she had also spied the lyrist again, entering the Leaky Cauldron for another singing session, instrument in tow. 

Any whimsy or suspicion over the intrepid musician had been interrupted by the heavens which, opened to formidable rainfall. Aurora hurried through the southern end of the street, head bowed beneath her hood.

It would have been better in all the uncertainty to have found a more convincing disguise than a dark garment, particularly as a marked woman. A mixture of squeamishness about altering her appearance through magical means, and as much as she detested herself for it – vanity -stayed her hand from such efforts. 

Furthermore, Aurora knew she was troubled by the nagging realisation that the euphoria she experienced from any potential altercation barely subsided at the sight of danger. Even as she kept her profile low, part of her desired a fight, for the escape it provided that ascended the murk of the streets around her and how it gave her a vent for her frustrations with the monsters among men.

Aurora was certain of her uncertainty. 

She was composed, determined and powerful, yet also confused, emotionally volatile and terrified. In other words, a contradictory mess

The shops were already closed, and any remaining lights were diluted by thick curtains drawn across the windows. The blurry expressions of light were barely visible through the torment of rainwater. 

Her destination however, was the red door to the right of Florian Fortescue’s Ice Cream parlour, whose lively shop exterior was concealed beneath steel shutters. Unmarked and furnished solely with a brass knocker, she gave it a shake before standing back, expecting to feel a confused tempest of thoughts from what she was about to do, but found her conscience surprisingly clear on the matter.

There was a delay, and Aurora pressed her ear against the door, hearing heavy footsteps reach a thudding crescendo.

Then, stepping back just in time, the door swung outward and Laurie revealed himself at the threshold, a steep staircase prominent behind him. 

“Rory,” he said with a smile.

Aurora tentatively responded in kind and studied his demeanour. His hair was a soaked miasma of olive and berry fragrance, clearly from a recent wash. Laurie’s weariness however, contrasted with any notion of freshness. It plagued his features much in the same way it had done in the Shrieking Shack and in Diagon Alley. His smile however, had greeted her arrival, which though expected, had defied the tired features troubling his handsome face.

Doing her best not to be disarmed by his searching stare, she tapped her hood and gestured to the rain outside.

She said, as breezily as possible, “Mind if I come in? It’s dripping a bit out here.”

“Sure,” said Laurie pointing at the staircase.

Aurora followed him through the entrance and took a winding route up several flights of steps to the top floor, finding a similarly blank door in the eaves of the building, stowed away in the rafters. 

Opening it with a jangle of keys, Laurie motioned for Aurora to follow him inside, and now she saw where Laurie had been living. This was his point of refuge ever since he had returned home from the news of his sister’s death.

Aurora found it hard to suppress an ironic laugh. 

Whilst she had stripped away the personality from her room, creating a caustic vacuum that allowed her to express all of her emotions openly to the world, Laurie had hidden his emotive cacophony where few else could see. Since she had bumped into him at the Leaky Cauldron, he had coated his bitterness and determination behind an equivocal, deadpan veneer, with an element of suave disbarment in his tone. This had only been broken, as fiercely and as tempestuously as it had done, when confronted with Rosier, where his true rage and anger was laid bare. 

Here in his room was further proof of that reality, alongside evidence of his magical brilliance and implacable determination. 

Notes, endless notes, and distracting arrays of maps, charts and photographs adorned the bare beams and dark wooden ceiling of his flat. He was living in what was essentially an attic, with gaps in the crusty floorboards bringing in light from below and detailing the empty store room underneath. A solitary window, magically enhanced by Laurie to remain on one pieced, rested against a bay at the far end of the room, erupting out of the tiled roof of Fortescue’s establishment.

The splashes of colour, leaking through the dirge, showed Ministry corridors, pictures of Dumbledore and Moody, and dialogue webs about suspected Death Eaters. Pages of his writing were taped to walls, and bed of raven quills sat on the floor, their nubs broken from excessive use. 

Only a bookshelf, cluttered with annotated tomes, and a desk, took position in Laurie’s abode, whilst he clearly slept against the distant wall, under a loose arrangement of blankets and soft pillows (clearly pinched from muggle furniture store in the nearby area). A stray selection of mismatched candles lit the room, though they barely permeated the shadows beyond a breath of their positions on the floor, the wax and wick of their light being barely up to the task. 

Aside from that, his possessions amounted to little more than a litter of clothes under an eave, a magically sustained kettle (already filled with water) that took residence to the left of his red jumper whose sleeve stuck out from to order pile, and a photograph of his family in a gold frame that lay next to the cushion that she imagined he had adopted as a pillow. 

Normally clothes wouldn’t matter to her, however, above the evidence and suggestion of serious investigation, Laurie’s red jumper exposed on the ground arrested her attention. It was the same one he had worn around Hogwarts six years ago. He had changed, unmistakeably, but a constituent element remained. It hammered home the point that in the act of avenging his sister, fashion had taken a pronounced backseat.

She had to similarly dismiss the somewhat nostalgic reality of the fumes scenting the room, which was of heady, fragrant incense, identical in taste and complexion to the type that he had enjoyed using on the sly at Hogwarts to calm his mind at study. One time he had even personalised the scent, leaving one in the library but charming so only they could smell it, tucking it under his desk so the hawkish Madam Pince wouldn’t notice it.

Taking that into account and with the magpie possession of books that hinted as his former love of academia, she could see that despite any façade of cool isolation, he was in flux. Like anyone in the war, his identity had been pulled and twisted until misshapen and ill-formed. 

The man he was, the woman she was, was really dependent on little more than the hour of the day. 

Stepping over an empty whisky bottle, ignoring the pang of déjà vu it gave her from her alcoholic tinged smuggling efforts in Hogsmeade a Fifth Year, Aurora turned to Laurie as he closed the door behind her.

“It’s funny,” she said, trying to keep the tone light, “I don’t see a shower in here. 

“Florian is nice enough to let me use his wash room,” said Laurie both jovially but with a hint of bitterness, “in return I pay through the nose for this rent and have to be the patron saint of bloody free drinks at the Cauldron whenever he pops in for his boisterous bridge game.”

Aurora said, “And this is what you have been up to since…”

“This isn’t everything, here on the walls,” said Laurie, “but it’s all that is relevant to this case.”

“Did you visit home?” she asked hesitantly, keeping her gaze on Laurie for as long as possible, doing her best to plant the seeds, hoping he’d follow her eyes.

“In the Highlands?” replied Laurie, “Yes, it was bare. Parents took anything of sentimental value off to the States. As for clues – not that we need them now - the Ministry had swept it. Which is why I knew Liverpool Street toilets would be little more than a morose mausoleum for you.”

“Hmm….” 

“And, the truth is,” continued Laurie, before she could think of anything cogent to say, “I don’t miss it. Scotland: cold, lonely and bare. London is better, but I can only enjoy a place festered with rats for so long. I don’t mean the ones that nibble on cheese either, I mean the sort that kill Lola.”

He shook his head, and carried on with his embittered observations, “My faith in everyone has been so shaken, not that I was ever naively trusting before. Even when I met you a month ago, I still thought Dumbledore had your interests, but he hasn’t spoken to you since, right? Perhaps he is in bed with Mundungus Fletcher after all. I don’t trust the Resistance, and I don’t trust the Ministry, not after what I’ve been through. All I want is to take what is mine, and get the hell out of here, as soon as I bloody can.”

Skipping any convention of building chatter, he had got straight to the crux of his troubles. Aurora reckoned that his words, now venomously laced with his gallic infused drawl, were perhaps the most honest he had said to her in a long time. 

“When I left for the colleges in Luxembourg, when I left you,” he said, a little ruefully, “I was under this intoxicating, arrogant haze of wizarding advancement. My belief of further magic for our own kind, founded on this noble trust I had of our world, was little more than a fool’s assertion. You see, as much I hated or disliked people, I had nothing short of undying faith in wizardkind and our ability to further ourselves, and for society to do what is best for us all. In the right circumstances however, even the eternal belief dies. I spent years, researching for projects, chatting with professors, all under the high vaunted notion I was contributing towards something. Now I will be nothing in the grave, like everyone. With what we have been doing, my stay in the dirt probably isn’t far away.”

Aurora knew this was time to let him vent, like expelling poison from a wound, she stood still and kept her focus on Laurie as he spoke, in a pained mumble, staring at the ground.

“When news of Lola’s death broke, the colleges didn’t care. Their heads were up in the clouds. They thought their studies were so important. I lost my position by leaving, I can’t return, but I don’t care anymore. I have to disown that piece of myself to do what I must. I am more ashamed that I hadn’t spoken to my only sister for over a year when she died. Not through fallout but through laziness and conceit on my own part. My great ambitions for the world are so trivial compared to the suffering and moral destitution that chokes every step I tread here. Everything I wanted was little more than an infantile dream.”

An element of guilt crept into her psyche. Much of what he said echoed her own feelings about her life, and his awakening from his mystical stupor had more than a passing resemblance to her visions of exploration being cut short by Rupert’s death.

All the while, his detective displays made the comparisons between Laurie and her own father come into startling focus. Freudian engagements aside, it added a depressing note of sadness to what she had to do.

Somewhat downtrodden, he asked Aurora, “You had any news about the Beaker?”

Aurora could have mentioned either of her dreams since Borgin and Burkes, but said as equivocally as possible, “Not a word, and not even a murmur of communication from old Greybeard.”

Now she saw that Laurie, initially a sympathetic blend of vulnerable and honest was scrutinising her every syllable. With a laser focus, she realised that he was doing his best to hide how intensely he was studying her body language, looking for tells in her demeanour. After all they had fallen out badly yesterday, and this offer of taking out Rodolphus together was meant to be emotionally detached between themselves, and personal only to their target. She felt like a specimen in a Herbology greenhouse, being forensically observed for out-of-character behaviours. 

Luckily she knew him better than anyone still living this side of the Atlantic. When he entered this focus of an almost academic persuasion, he always sub-consciously raised his left eye brow, a tell that he exposed even now. The only difference was the ferocity of his examination of Aurora, looking for deceit in her words, since Lola had left this world. 

For extra affect, Aurora, understanding she was a poor occlumens and hoping he hadn’t been subtly applying any form of legilimency, allowed her honest feelings to decorate her mask, “Blooming Dumbledore! It is a matter he must help clear up once we have done what needs to be done.”

A pained grin broke across Laurie’s face.

“We’ll get there,” he said consolingly in the end, placing his hand on her shoulder. The touch of his flesh, even through the thick cotton of her coat, sent flutters of butterflies through her core. It didn’t matter that she spiked their interaction with lies, and that an element of necessary deception had entered their dialogue and would reach a powerful addendum if all went to plan, his affectionate focus on her reverberated against dormant fibres of her heartstrings. 

As he let go of her shoulder, his face came to one of troubled concern.

“What is it?” she asked, worried he may have crumpled her ruse.

He made a step towards the desk, before pausing, and returning back to where he stood moments before.

“Here, let me take your coat,” he said.

He eased the garment from her shoulders, the sleek silk lining sliding off her skin, revealing the tight t-shirt she wore underneath, and the imprint of bloody memories from her travels in the Far East carved into her arms. The sensation, which she encouraged, of Laurie removing the coat from her body had the flustering effect of stimulating her.

Laurie hung it on a loose nail knocked into the door frame, before saying, “Have you seen the Prophet today?”

Aurora shrugged, “I doubt it.”

It was then that she realised, ever since Laurie had greeted her at the door, that he had been completely bare-chested. Testament to her exceptional inability to observe the more basic surroundings, more interested in how his kookiness had been stamped out through war, and how determined he looked with all his plans on the wall, the most fundamental aspect to his appearance had completely passed her by. 

It might not be symbolic in any way, but as a loud visual difference it was a strange one to miss.

Trying to keep her attention on the matters at hand, she sucked in her breath as Laurie ruffled his drying, curly hair, which had descended in waves down his neck due to the moisture. He was as lean as he had always been, though unlike before, his body had not been untouched his projects. Whatever he had been doing to get information and whoever his friends were, the quest for revenge had left a mark on him. 

A collection of scars painted his wiry but increasingly muscled frame, including a slash across his chest that hadn’t come from any of the actions they had done together. Half healed wounds and cuts plagued his torso, clearly not entirely removable through magical means. With some purpose he went to his desk and took a seat, giving his striped pyjama trousers a tug. He reached for the copy of the Prophet lying across the surface of the table and threw it to Aurora.

“What do you see?” he inquired, facing the wall as she studied the paper. 

Aurora glanced across the front page of the day’s edition. Alongside the standard fare of Ministry bulletins, and information on the current disabling of the Floo Network, was a particularly garish attempt at prosaic diversion. Stubby Boardman of the Hob Goblins, shown reaching from the stage and pulling a girl from the crowd as he performed was the chief feature of the front cover, whilst a line under the photo suggested the reader turned to page four and browsed their concert review. The main article, un-pictured and lacking a headline was simply a reassurance memo about noise at Hogsmeade. In a box on the left were two links, one about Minister’s upcoming visit to Hogwarts to open a new floor of the library, the other about a fresh a cooking recipe. This particular story was advertised also by a charmed tablespoon dancing across the footer banner only completed an inappropriate jovial image to counteract the usual grim pronouncements of the time. Aurora had realised, through surveying yellowing editions of the Prophet for the past two weeks that they alternated between two techniques. The first was keeping everything notably mundane and low key, the other was to accomplish what they had to today, to reveal enough bad news to the public so that they clung to the authority of the Ministry rather than challenging them, and to cheer them up with hot gossip and gizmo articles.

So it didn’t surprise her that the Prophet was keeping people stupid. She didn’t realise however what made this particular edition any more noteworthy. 

“I don’t see much,” she said after a while.

“Exactly,” said Laurie, turning a little exasperated at her response, “But I think you’re missing the full scale of what you’re not seeing. Where is Greyback’s trial in this? They love to promote a big success and to bury bad news behind fellatio friendly crud. This is what they deal with most of the time. They reported his trial yesterday, why not today? I mean, where is Skeeter’s usual column? If you look there is even a Quidditch interview in its place. Worst of all….”

“There is no mention of Rosier,” concluded Aurora, with a sigh. It had taken her far too long to cotton onto this.

“Nowhere to be found,” confirmed Laurie, slamming his hand on the desk.

“You’d have thought,” he growled through gritted teeth, “that Rosier would have made the news. Greyback’s capture was milked to high heaven. They arrested some assistant at Honeydukes the other week on trumped up charges and that made it in here. Don’t you remember how close Fudge came to finding us? It isn’t right. They had a Death Eater, two fixers, and eight thugs within their grasp at the Shrieking Shack. Where is the news of their arrests? Why aren’t their brute ugly faces being paraded for all to see?”

Laurie was still sitting on the chair, his rib cage heaving up and down, with his head now in his hands. Aurora imagined that his plans for tomorrow, perhaps delicately laid, as layered and as secretive as the friends who had aided him all this way, were dependent on the tightest minutiae of detail. The mystery of Rosier was a deeply unsettling one. 

Truthfully, Aurora had no idea what had happened, though it filled her with unease. Her father would have to know tomorrow, the likelihood was that she wasn’t going to stick around for Laurie’s plan. Fudge could have been a double-agent, or perhaps they had managed to escape through other means. The only news of disappearances and deaths came second hand or through a disorienting process of Chinese whispers. She imagined the Resistance, in whatever form they existed, were clued up on affairs, but not being part of their regressive little team, she had no option but to take them out of the moral equation.

Aurora braced herself for her next move.

With Laurie’s head still in his hands; she took hold of the armrest and knocked it clockwise, towards her. 

The chair swivelled gently on its axis, the mechanism making a timorous squeak as it rotated. Laurie, not resisting the repositioning of his seat, took his arms away from his face and waited until the chair directly faced Aurora, parallel to the desk. 

She leant down, so that she was now level with the forgiving hue of his eyes, crystallised in Aurora’s vision by the lenses of his glasses. His face was illuminated by a candle on the desk, accentuating the pronounced curves of his cheekbones, and the resplendent sheen that coated his curly hair which still smelt invitingly and nostalgically of olive. 

In a mellow whisper, she pressed her lips to Laurie’s ear, and said, “We’ll sort it out tomorrow.”

She pulled her wand from the back pocket of her jeans, and pointed it at the window bay. With a nonchalant swish, the curtain closed, the only clue to the outside world now being the steady patter of rain beating against the glass.

Then, taking hold of Laurie’s hand, she straddled the chair, sitting across his lap. Her legs firm on the muscle of his thighs. 

Though eight inches shorter than Laurie in normal circumstance, their faces were now more or less level, as she sat across from him and massaged the back of his palm, cooing softly like a songbird.

Aurora bit her lip, teasing him with a girlish grin, her dark eyes keeping contact with his. Remembering an old trick of days past, she stared at his nose, then his left eye, and then his right, and saw that Laurie was following the movements of her pupils with the same rapt attention he had for her at Hogwarts. 

The flame had broadened through the firebox, warming the room considerably since they entered, and intensifying the formerly diffusing vapours of fragrance so that they danced through her nostrils, imbuing her with a further relaxed confidence. Droplets of sweat had cropped across her forehead, but as Laurie breathed in, she saw that if anything it was attracting him further.

She let go of his hand, and out of both instinct and remembrance from their previous relationship, she playfully pressed his bare abdomen. As if imitating a wandering spider, her hand crawled up his chest, the touch of his skin electrifying her impulses, empowering her with an animalistic want. 

Her soothing fingers, in their ticklish behaviour clearly pleasured Laurie enough that he let out a contented chuckle, before he opened his mouth, perhaps wishing to speak.

Making a shushing sound, Aurora stopped him in his tracks, and Laurie obliged as she pressed her finger against his lip, like he had done to her in the pub weeks before. She stroked his face, brushing faint stubble as she drifted her nail across his skin, almost baiting him. 

His uncertainties had drifted away; as Aurora saw that she had his undivided attention. 

“It can wait till tomorrow,” she said, “all of it, when we put destiny into our own hands.”

Then after pushing her hair back, which had drooped over her forehead, she rested her hands on his shoulders. With her wrists crooked on the blades, she tilted her head, opening her mouth only a few millimetres, and leant in for the kiss.

Laurie moved forwards in his chair as his breath: so welcoming, so assuring and so familiar to Aurora, echoed through her lips before they made contact.

Then their lips locked and, tentatively, at first, they kissed. Hesitation crept through as Laurie closed his mouth around her top lip, and weaved his tongue through her teeth. Cold tremors reverberated within Aurora’s soul. She may have had Machiavellian intention; however, his reciprocation of her offer of intimacy touched her. They were no longer lovers, but this shared suggestion of togetherness powered her with a jubilance that cleansed the murky troubles of her mind.

She pulled away momentarily, and inhaled for a moment. Laurie was looking at her with a relish that she had not seen from him since they had corrupted the “girls only” rule of the Gryffindor dormitories.

Six years ago, Aurora had snuck in to the common room courtesy of Laurie’s house beating Ravenclaw in a quidditch match. As the lion fans hosted a party, they had spirited themselves to the girl’s dormitory after finding Laurie’s bed “in use” by the Head Boy at the time. Aurora had disabled the charmed slide, and Laurie had swept her from her feet and carried her to a powerful expression of their bottled, teenage lust, coveting her body, whilst she desired his. 

Aurora closed her eyes, and pulled at his bottom lip with her teeth, tugging at his skin until it bled and flecks of blood tickled her taste buds, absorbing the warmth of his flesh. With a moan of pleasure, he reached squeezed her hips, fingers pressing into the bone. Meanwhile, his tongue now crept through her mouth, caressing and beating her own, subduing it and whetting its coarse tip in her frenulum, absorbing its moisture.

This primal pleasure was mixed with the rekindling of romantic remembrances. She was acquainting herself once more with his very essence, and reluctantly realising that the glowing euphoria and haunting shivers his intimacy brought to her soul had been sorely missed. They were difficult to ignore. As his tongue continued to stroke the underside of her mouth, holding down her own in a display of assertive power, feverishly massaging her, she was put at an ease which at least for this moment, swept away the intentions of her actions and the troubles of the past few weeks. 

Seemingly, the temperature continued to rise, the rainfall had ostensibly subsided or had been discarded to the peripheries of her rationality, whilst the musk of his hair absorbed her senses, catching them in an intoxicating dance of primal desire.

Aurora also revelled in the familiarity of the occasion. 

Sure, she had sex plenty of times since they broke up. Aurora had been living abroad as a rugged explorer, with every day perhaps being her last. She was queen among a frivolously promiscuous assortment of daredevils that cared for coin and hedonism alongside their own sense of discovery or love for academia. Curse breakers attracted a particular blend and she had slept with half a dozen of the expeditionary pack during her four years out in the Far East. Though this wasn’t unusual, she also wasn’t one for notions of female modesty. There had been enough bath houses and curious locals fascinated by white, Western bodies to make her time worthwhile - even one that she used in a state of grief on the way home. Laurie was her first however, and the only man she could make any claim to having loved outside of her immediate family. 

As they passionately embraced, Aurora, despite herself, found the release of tension and the brooding troubles to be overwhelming. For now there was nothing beyond this room, nothing other than what was in front of her.

Aurora, volatile, improvisational and utterly determined, and Laurie, obsessed, powerful and with intelligence beyond measure, were as much as she pained to admit it, very much made for each other. 

They then broke away once more, as Laurie put his glasses to rest on the desk. 

It was only a momentary pause, and his hands, which had been clasped around her lower down, reached up her shirt, stretching the fabric until he found the hook of her bra. With an almost clicking motion, he undid the strap, and Aurora smiled somewhat wryly as the wire drooped below her sternum, and her breasts descended an inch or so from their pushed position. His hands took the rims of her shirt, rolling it so that it slowly exposed her taut stomach. Laurie rolled it upwards until it rested above her ribs before, with Aurora’s consent; he pulled it over her head, freeing it from her body. 

Her fringe had fallen over her eyes once more, wavy strands beaded with sweat resting on her cheeks. With her vision already obscured, she only felt his hands brush her now exposed neck as he tied the shirt across her eyes like a blindfold, tightening it at the back. The hair, plastered over her eyelids, soaking the skin, confused her senses further as Laurie kissed her again letting her blindly dictate the movements of his tongue within her mouth. 

Acting out of some element of autonomy, she locked both her hands with his, tessellating their fingers and digging into the nooks above his knuckles. From that position of strength, she continued to rotate her pelvis before giving Laurie a squeezing hug, thrilled by the reliance on sensing his breath, his smell and unique touch, her vision deprived by the clothes. Still in a tight embrace, she parted with her bra, shrugging it off her chest, Laurie helping with the straps on each side. She then held the garment aloft, which Laurie sniffed with an animalistic enthusiasm, leisuring in her scent. 

Her scars, the reminders of her dangerous trade and ambitious mission rubbed against the protrusions from Laurie’s chest, they were one and the same in so many ways, and had both counted the cost of their choices. She thought they were doomed and it turned her on more than any bubbling embodiment of optimism.

Then, Aurora felt her body lurch forwards, as the chair pulled back with a screech, and within seconds, her body had parted from the seat, lifted up into the air by Laurie.

With another gasp of relief they kissed again, as Laurie carried her across the room. Her legs were wrapped around his waist, tightly positioned above his hips whilst her hands dug into his back, her nails embedded into his skin, grazing the flesh as tremors of ecstasy awakened her biological imperatives. With the blindfold still firm, a sense of out-of-body weightlessness dictated her equilibrium as Laurie swept her across to the far end of the room.

Placing her down on a nest of blankets that Aurora knew acted as a makeshift bed. As she lay across the sheets, she realised that they had been immensely cushioned with magic, so that her back sunk into the thin rags without feeling the imposing wooden floorboards underneath. He let go of her hands. They were feet away from the burning incense, to the point that she felt the blood flow to her left cheek, heating up in the intensifying flame.

Laurie pecked at her chest, before kissing her stomach, making a knowing raspberry sound as he did so. Aurora obliged with a laugh, before she felt pressure ease from her waist as he undid the buttons of her jeans. 

The trousers were fitted pretty snugly to her skin, and even with the blindfold, she sat up and helped him slip them off her legs. Then Laurie leant in and whispered into her open mouth, caressing the word from his lips, “Lie down”.

Charmed, Aurora lay flat on her back as he took off her socks and jewellery, placing her eclectic mixture of timepieces, wristbands and bracelets on the floor. He also untied her rope necklace, which had gently beat against his neck as they eloped. Aurora heard it drop next to her left ear. Bare on the bed, she playfully wriggled her toes and stretched out her arms as Laurie took off her underwear. 

Expecting to feel a chill as she led naked and exposed on the sheets, Aurora realised that as usual she was more self-conscious about the scuffed skin on her ankles than the reveal of her body to a man she had offered it to so willingly so many times before. This was true even if their relationship was now more distant and operating in a wilderness of confusion and conflicting visions of the world. 

He also, familiar with the body flaws that gave her anxiety, such as the mole on her torso, the birthmark on her upper thigh, and the permanent stretch mark below her belly button, meant she had no sense of apprehension. 

The pressure of a knee sank into the mattress either side of her as he hovered over her abdomen. 

“I have no idea what will happen,” he said, “at the end of all this. What I do know is that I let you down a long time ago, and I owe you an apology at least for that.”

A radiating toxicity of guilt plagued her conscience. She knew what she would need to do next. But those inhibitions gave way to a blossoming sense of delirium and nervous excitement.

Using his tongue once more, he buried into the deepest fibres of her being, and a stratospheric, mesmeric, bacchanal, of primitive pleasure shot through her body. Bombast of unfettered joy shook through her bones, as he was manipulating her very being at her will. Ripples of unadulterated joy caused her to shiver.

His technique, similar in so many ways to before, was now fuelled by a rapturous eagerness and an unusual longing. She felt barer than anyone ever could, everything possessing an echo of anthropomorphic sanctity.

Her heart was thudding, and she clutched at the sheets as the harmony and euphoria ascended to an elative bliss that commanded her functions beyond any conscious compulsions. 

The pulsating rage of the burning incense singed her with a consuming heat, and a beating rhythm that sped her ascent into greater pleasure. 

With a spluttering gasp, her body let go of any resisting doubts or uncomfortable notions of awkwardness as she expressed her happiness in the most fundamental and ethereal way. He had ascended beyond intimacy, striking the gears of her being, and Aurora felt their passion reach a euphoric explosion of exultation.

It wasn’t the first time, but it was the only occasion she could think of, even if blindfolded, that everything had happened on her terms.

When the tempestuous waves of symphonic delight eventually calmed, she removed the shirt from her face, and sat up, pushing back the mop of hair draped over her face. 

“Apology accepted,” Aurora said.

Laurie laughed, before Aurora placed her palm on his chest, and pushed him onto the mattress. 

She scratched at his abdomen, colouring the skin a fuller pink before she undid his pyjama bottoms and flung them across the room. 

“My turn,” Aurora whispered, with a smile.

Seven hours later, resting naked in a spooned position, with Laurie’s arms wrapped around her waist, she made a few stirring noises, feigning an awakening.

“Can’t sleep?” asked Laurie.

“What time is it?” Aurora replied wearily.

She had barely slept a wink; as she doubted she could until the disturbing dreams had vacated her slumber. Aurora also understood that she needed to be alert for what had to happen next. Sympathy and pity reeked through her bones. When she mulled the matter over, whilst he had snored away, she knew there was an element of treachery and emotional torment in her upcoming plan. But she was convinced this was the right course of action. 

“Nearly five in the morning, it was an early night in,” said Laurie, with typical observational wit.

Aurora gave Laurie another kiss, stepping out of the sheets. She reached for her wand, sticking out from the pocket of her errant jeans lying by the bookshelf, tossed away in a moment of passion. She was reminded of the bare nature of her body as her breasts drooped without restraint when she reached for the instrument.

Aurora turned down the incense, using her wand like a dial to cool down the room. In the past few hours, the heat had come unbearable, but needing to feign slumber, she had been unable to reach for the wand and had marinated in their body heat and the fragrant flame. 

Before she could slip on her clothes, Laurie said, “Your tattoos, they weren’t there before?”

“Nope,” said Aurora, standing up on the bed, groaning as she bent her knees.

Laurie, still lying down, pointed at the tattoo on her hip, and asked, “What does that mean?”

“Did you not see these earlier?” she said, deflecting the chatter.

“I did, but there was no time to ask, if you get my point,” he said with a smirk.

Aurora smiled and tossed back her hair, supposedly frivolously but actually ensuring she had what she was looking for.

“Well, it’s Ancient Chinese, it means endless joy. A bit frivolous but the runes were particularly pretty. In the same way the one on my arm in Mandarin says ‘pretty orchid’, because it looks nice.”

Laurie said, “I guess the one advantage we have is we can remove them with a spell or two, unlike the muggles, they get theirs forever you know.”

“You never thought of getting one?”

“Nah, they’re not my sort of thing. I don’t mind face paint though.”

That was true, Laurie’s one dalliance with serious trouble was when inebriated, painting his face yellow and terrifying a host of house elves by popping out of the kitchen flowerpot and pretending to be a man-eating flower. They knew he wasn’t a flower, but a yellow man shouting with the scent of alcohol, toxic to house elves, under his breath, was enough of a problem to begin with. Aurora remembered it fondly as a lapse in judgement. Unfortunately, that was back when lapses in judgement were considerably more innocent. 

“The other tattoos make more sense,” observed Laurie.

Aurora rubbed the two inch dragon tattoo on her lower back, a tribute to the beast she escaped from months before. She also had a raven in flight, representing Ravenclaw, her house. The painted sigil, royal blue in colouring, was the only tattoo she had applied herself at fifteen years, resting on her unscarred forearm. The other three were remnants from a smoky wizarding den in Zheivang, served by a sage, bushy bearded man who she referred to as Vinegar, due to his bitter anecdotes and the fact he always smelt of piss. Aurora could easily have removed the tattoos with the aid of a mirror but frankly she hadn’t found the time in the ensuing chaos. Incidentally, she had also searched the entire expression of literature for an appropriate motivational phrase to imprint on her body for her struggle ahead. So far she had returned fruitless. 

Covering herself with a stray sheet, which moonlighted as a makeshift shawl, she turned to Laurie and said, “Tea?”

“I was about to ask anyway,” he teased.

Aurora strode over to the kettle and soothed it to a gentle boil with a wave of her hand. 

Then as Laurie reclined back against his pillow and stared up at the ceiling, Aurora acted.

She searched the back of her head again and kept digging through her mane of hair until she found the small, beige capsule that she had magically glued to her neck before she had arrived.

It was tiny, the size of a marble in dimension but flat and passable as skin without proper scrupulous examination. One of her altered spells, devised to created climbing walls across chasms in tombs, was a sticking charm that was powerful and tough to break unless manipulated by the caster of the spell. Only Aurora (and that was if she expressly wished to) could pull the capsule from her skin. This meant that if Laurie had seen it; she could have passed it off as a scar or a mole. 

When stirring their two teas, taking one for herself not to arouse suspicion, Aurora furtively glanced in Laurie’s direction and saw him rubbing his eyes, still lying across the bed.

Convinced of his ignorance, she split the capsule and dropped it in both mugs. Pouring hot water into them, dissolving the tasteless halves, she reached for the box of muggle tea bags and stirred the drinks with a nearby spoon. She closed her eyes, and sensed the strand of unicorn hair, dyed mature brown to camouflage with her own locks, above her right ear and yanked it free. She secured it in the gap of her molars. On contact with hot water, it would be the necessary antidote and counterbalance to the effects of the capsule. She had thought it through in case Laurie rumbled her and switched their drinks.

Coming back to the bed with mugs in hand, Laurie lowered his book and accepted the cup.

“Thanks hun,” he said.

Before Aurora could drink he took a sip.

“Mmm…just what I needed. To be honest, I don’t intend to sleep now. We’ve got a bit of time, so I am going to get my brain into gear with some light reading. There are a few books I pilfered from Flourish and Blotts on the shelf if you’re interested. After that, we can get ready for Rodolphus Lestrange.”

He took another satisfied gulp before placing his hands on the mattress, making to stand up, perhaps to put on some clothes.

As he proportioned weight to his arms, his bent elbows slackened and his forearms sank back into the sheets.

Aurora was hunched at the other end of the bed. Tea clasped in hands, she looked across at his struggling pose, furrowing her brow quizzically.

The potion was supposed to have an instantaneous effect. Even cosseted inside a capsule, each half was potent.

At DJ Pippins, she had bought a sleeping potion to go with the Veritaserum.

A minuscule bottle, black and shiny, the size of a bead, had caught her attention moments before Avery had tucked the box back behind his counter and continued the deception of a sterile, everyday medicine store.

She had asked what it was, and Avery had revealed it was a Sleeping Draught. 

The liquid was normally ordered by a Ministry busybody who had a son with bedsores. The potion was illegal outside hospitals, banned even in the Hogwarts classroom for study purposes. The official, however, apparently did not trust St Mungo’s who would insist on administering the brew and taking his child under their care. After the son duly died from improper medical treatment, Avery had stock to sell. 

Only a miniscule amount was needed and Aurora had channelled the concoction into capsules, which were charmed brown to blend with the tea, just in case the potion didn’t dissolve properly. 

There was reason for the unicorn hair resting between her molars. Unicorn hair, when heated by water, let out fumes that awoke people from stupors, a technique used by healers during the Goblin rebellion so that the Ministry could question political prisoners.

Aware of the rather nihilistic history of the practice, she did her best to shake off any complexions of guilt at her choices. This was a necessary action, however uncomfortable. 

Laurie had trusted her with an unwariness that was anathema to his normal behaviour. Just as Aurora had expected he would. Now, as the tea coursed through his bloodstream, he felt its full effect.

Avery had explained that the bottle supplied a day of sleep. With the capsule melted in his tea representing half the bottle, she would have twelve hours to do what needed to be done. 

Laurie’s arm sagged and his back fell against the mattress. Craning his neck, his eyes fluttering with a new found heaviness, Aurora could just make out the panic and alarm reflected in his pupils, whilst he clenched his hand, making his veins come into focus.

Realisation, of a galling nature, defined his movements.

Everything was embodied in these precious seconds, his sense of hurt, his shock at being bested by a witch he believed himself superior to, his surprise she had such subterfuge in her and his desperate fury at being denied his revenge. Every aspect to Laurie’s overall fragility was encompassed in that brief moment as the potion took hold of his senses, commanding his body to its will.

Aurora had loved him, and she had forgiven him for the worst of their relationship. She was thrilled to have found an ally in Diagon Alley that day, but she also knew him better than anyone. 

Lola’s death had changed him, heightening his worst features. His bitterness and his disdain for those who disagreed with him had coarsened his morality to the point that Aurora thought he was utterly ruthless. Mixed in with his ability and his dedication for revenge, she felt that Larie simply couldn’t be trusted. 

Her father had offered her a way out of this quagmire. Frankly, Aurora felt that he was a considerably more stable choice for the upcoming day.

Even at his lowest ebb, he’d have never used a Cruciatus curse. Her father may have unfairly sheltered her from the truth, but he wouldn’t have endangered her in the Shrieking Shack like Laurie had done, especially without fully letting her in on the plan. 

She also had no idea who his friends were at the Ministry. There was a blind spot, as she didn’t know what he had been doing outside of meeting her and attending his shifts at the pub. The way he had seamlessly entered banter with the thugs had unsettled her, and when she thought about it even now, her heart fluttered with uncertainty. 

He knew them too well; whilst his ability to get to places in the Ministry meant that he probably possessed rather dark connections that she had no wish to be a part of. 

At some point, if they continued together, she would be forced into make a decision to join in with whatever morally vague plans took his fancy, or feel the wrath of him and his concealed collection of contacts and friends. 

He may have told her that he wanted to leave as soon as he got revenge, but she knew Laurie better than that. 

One passion project would consume after another, and now that he had become so merciless, these projects weren’t going to be stuffy recordings of academia. 

As her mind was cluttered by a myopic miasma of paranoia, only catalysed further by the pounding regularity of sinister dreams, she hasn’t dispelled the suggestion that he was Dumbledore’s spy.

Dumbledore could go to hell for all she cared. This was a matter to solve with her father, and then Dumbledore could come into the picture and explain what had gone so terribly wrong. 

She would bring justice to Lola’s killer, and alleviate the worst reverberations of guilt at Rupert’s passing. 

Yet, if Laurie had any chance of being redeemed or reasoned with, giving him a taste of satisfying death was hardly going to help. 

Aurora felt guilt at using him. She had screwed him to regain some trust and to energise old feelings. It was low, but it was necessary, the only way. Moral righteousness may have been absent, but her actions were all she could do in the situation. 

“You bitch,” he snarled, tears of anguish running down his eyes.

He reached for his wand, which flew into his hand from across the room, surprising Aurora with his resistance to the potion.

It was only an infinitesimal rebellion for as soon as he clasped the handle, it fell limp in his fingers. He collapsed on the bed, face down. His eyes shut on contact with the sheets, and vaporous phantoms of steam crept through Aurora’s nose as his cup of tea spilt across the floorboards.

Aurora looked at him with an appropriate sense of remorse.

Initially she thought to snap his wand and tie him up. That was the plan, from the detached drafts of her mind. 

For whatever reason, a groundswell of guilt plaguing her conscience prevented her from doing so. 

Deciphering the reasons for this wasn’t difficult. Whatever faults she had with him, he was her first love. She had used him. All for her own purposes, no matter how morally justifiable they were. 

Jarringly, she had understood Laurie. Aurora had carefully manipulated him that evening. She knew that Laurie still underestimated her. That, combined with some residual feelings for her, meant that shared intimacy was likely to catalyse hitherto complacency within his behaviour. He had carefully analysed her every response the night before, when asking about Dumbledore, but now she had bested him with a relatively simple form of deception.

To her discomfort, whilst she had assessed Laurie so effectively, she had misunderstood herself. 

Aurora wanted to undertake her plan with an element of complete dispassion. Yet the touch of his tongue had softened her, and the heat of their encounter had unravelled her emotional equilibrium. Part of Aurora had even wanted her to revel in tricking him. If any residual feelings were going to ruminate through her being, she had hoped they would have been ones of superiority at dispatching a man to her mercy after he had ended their relationship on the grounds of academic pretension. Understanding how merciless he had become, she maybe had hoped she’d be thrilled at seeing a threat to the ultimate goal of avenging Rupert quietly fall to the wayside. 

Instead, she harboured pools of guilt that dampened any bravado or false sense of conquest. She had used him, and now he lay exposed by her treacherous hand. 

Discontinuing her original plan, mopped up the tea and dragged his body around until he was in a more sleeping conventional position. As she pulled his limbs across the blankets, her sides ached from the effort. The fresh scar on her hip flashed past her vision as she glanced down at her aching torso. It was a reminder of the physical cost of a conflict which dominated every waking moment of her life. 

Laurie’s unconscious body was the emotional cost, laid bare before her. 

Continuing within the theme of self-reflection, she understood she had flaws, but never before could she aptly refer to herself as heartless.

Using an old flame, tricking him, and then denying him personal revenge for the death of his little sister meant that the term applied to her only too readily. 

Aurora had no interest in lingering. She tucked the sheets around his body, and felt his gentle breath echo through her ears as she knelt by his rising chest.

In other circumstances, it would seem as though Laurie was contentedly dreaming, at peaceful rest. Hidden beneath the magically induced trance that compelled his body into a forced stupor, Aurora was sure that Laurie was seething, raging at her betrayal. Again, the comparison to her mother flickered across her mind’s eye. That morning she had been almost willing her to speak, to awaken from the troubling recesses of her mind. Fate, it seemed, had a rather macabre sense of humour, placing her before a comatose body once again. 

She kissed his forehead, timorously touching his brow.

“I will find justice for Lola, I promise,” she whispered.

With a squeeze of limp palm, she stood up again, aware that if Laurie could somehow hear her words from the odyssey of his sleep, he probably wasn’t going to take any “promises” of hers with a pinch of salt. 

Then, she hastily got dressed, leaving the sweaty shirt and borrowing one of Laurie’s to go with her coat. 

Moments later, she felt the cold chill of morning wind creep across her neck, as she apparated back to Wavelock.

It was time to deal with Rodolphus Lestrange.


	19. Vengenace

“Are you sure,” said Aurora, tracing her fingers across the panes of glass, “it doesn’t look like much?”

“Positive,” replied Gideon, “though, truth be told, I haven’t been here for a while.”

Aurora studied the phone box. 

Red and antiquarian, with its paint peeling across the frames, she had no reason to suggest anything substantial resided within its tight wooden confines. Aurora was also caught off-guard by the stench of congested sanitation in the drains below her feet. It laboured unpleasantly in her nostrils, the odour disagreeable to the point of saturating her mind with a dense fog. 

“Don’t worry about the pong,” said Gideon with a loose chuckle, “it is to ward off passers-by. A suggestive charm if you will.”

“It’s hardly charming,” said Aurora, pulling away from the panels, “and not exactly the impression I’d want to give when creating a ‘guests entrance’”

“Well, you mean a visiting entrance,” answered Gideon, “for sure it is rather rudimentary, an archaic method of warding off all but the most enthused. Nonetheless, our kind has never been the most welcoming. We need our protections, and this isn’t a holiday camp. This is a headquarters, and there are probably more pressing issues for them than your precious sense of smell.”

Aurora responded with a shrug. 

She took another glance round at the shops, concealed behind overnight protections of steel and plastic mesh. The dimensions of the narrow, pokey street reminded her of Diagon Alley, though without the ramshackle charm, whilst the closed points of commerce prompted recollections of the night before above Florian Fortescue’s. A sense of guilt paraded through her conscience, but Aurora couldn’t allow herself to indulge in such notions. She had made the right decision, one she couldn’t retch and moan over now. The deed had been done. 

“After you,” said Gideon, opening the door of the phone box, which coarsely scraped the pebbledash pavement as he pulled it back.

Sterile and lifeless, the booth’s interior was seemingly as unextraordinary as Aurora imagined it would be. The unhelpful tang of sewage had disappeared however, and a faint hint of lemon articulated the space, gently imbuing her with a pleasant contentment. 

Only a subtle difference here or there separated the phone box from its non-magical counterparts. Firstly, Aurora noticed the marked lack of suggestive sexual postcards and fliers, which had graphically adorned the few booths she had used in the past. Startling to her was also the cleanliness of the interior. The grease portrayed on the outside of the glass wasn’t corroborated by her surroundings, whilst the apparatus and furnishings had proved exceptionally repellent to graffiti and petty vandalism. 

It looked as if the phone box had never felt the touch of a muggle hand.

Aurora studied the dials of the phone, which were plastic and basic in construction. A speaker, connected by a coiled wire rested above the box, matte black in finish. No coin slot however, could be spied upon, and though she looked for a pricing suggestion, even getting muggle money out of her coat pocket in preparation, her gaze across the device was fruitless.

Eyebrow raised, she turned her attention back to her father, who was slouched against the door. 

Sensing her confusion, Gideon took off his hat, which was brushing the ceiling. For some reason he was smiling. It was as if he was testing her, enjoying the first time in a while to see her process her decisions and think. She wouldn’t have minded impressing him somehow, though unfortunately this ‘entrance’ to the Ministry had only made her increasingly quizzical. 

“Sometimes,” said Gideon, “even the greatest minds can’t solve puzzles not wishing to be solved. Sometimes you have to be told.”

There was a pause before he said, “Out the way please.” 

Gently pushing Aurora to the side, her body pressed against the glass, Gideon turned his attention to the dial.

“Now let’s see here,” he deduced gruffly, “it needs to spell MAGIC so that’s 6-2-4-4-2.”

The wheel of the dials whirred as his finger ran through the code. 

Before he could pick up the phone a voice permeated through the speaker grille, “Hello, welcome to the Ministry of Magic, what is your business today?”

Its tone was breezy and informal, yet its choice of words felt pointed, scrupulous and almost analytical. Perhaps it was her sense of paranoia; however it felt as though their plan was already being put under the knife.

Her father grunted, gesturing with his broad hands for Aurora to pick up the phone.

As expected, it was light to touch, hollow and as dispensable as any Muggle communication device.

“Err, yes hello,” she stuttered, feeling unusually pressured, holding the phone in her outstretched arm, calling into it as if shouting at an echoing cave. 

Her father was looking at her with an element of pronounced exasperation, rolling his eyes as she tripped over her own syllables.

“I am here to attend a charity function,” she said stiffly, looking at her father who, after rifling through his thick cotton jacket had pulled out a scrap of folded parchment. Stretching it flat, he handed it to Aurora, his palms unconventionally clammy and moist on touch. 

Reminding herself of their chosen deception, she glimpsed through the smudged collection of words and continued, “A function in the forum, just beyond the Atrium, for the Society of Healers.”

“Thank you,” replied the phone, persevering with an uneasily light tone.

Thinking their artifice of conversation was over, Aurora rested back against the glass, before the speaker continued its enquiries.

“What is your name?”

Aurora looked at her father for reassurance, who replied with a mere thumbs-up.

“Aurora,” she said, “Aurora Meadows.”

“Thank you,” repeated the speaker, and with a more observable element of femininity, her voice abandoning its androgenetic communique for a stern secretarial tone it said, “Please remember, take your wand to the desk for inspection.”

Then the grille took a step into the absurd, as a rather batty voice called across the booth, “Wizard Communications, brought to you by Welcome Witches, for the best in sound!”

Her father tried to stifle a laugh as a caterwauling jingle echoed through the booth, occupying their time for a few moments with the most peculiar of sponsorship messages.

Well, thought Aurora, at least someone understands the grotesque pantomime of this situation.

Then, as the music reached a cringing crescendo, it abruptly finished with a muffled fizz. A pink badge dropped out of the box, into tray below the grill rattling against the shiny surface. 

It said, “Aurora Meadows, Volunteer”

As she pinned it to her lapel, her father reached across the booth and whispered into her ear, “I will meet you in the Atrium, as promised.”

Then with no other words, he took a step away from Aurora and flashed his holly wand, vanishing into thin air, apparating across London before Aurora could even offer a reply.

“You could have waited for me to at least give you a good luck hug,” she grumbled disingenuously.

She looked around the phone box once again. She remained utterly confused. Despite all that planning during the morn, they hadn’t been able to delve into the full specificity of their modus operandi. How was this supposed to get her into the Ministry?

Then as these complaints echoed through her skull, the floor trembled beneath her feet. The edges of the surface began to vibrate, and then with a gradual ease she began to descend below ground. The phone box remained in place but the floor reached for the earth below, the cobbles of the road disappearing from her vision. Instead, almost like an elevator interior, only the mechanised metal of the pulley system decorated her descent into the Ministry below.

As her father had promised, they had set off from Wavelock early that day.

Aurora had met him in his office at six on the dot, abandoning the tumultuous episode in Diagon Alley. Gideon had asked no questions of her. He merely accepted Aurora’s words that “Laurie couldn’t make it” with a slight nod and a busy ruffle of his receding hairline.

He had given her time to change, asking her to smarten up her appearance whilst doing so. Now she was garbed in more formal attire. It wasn’t her dress robes, but a sharp navy coat, with polished shoes, spotless trousers and a white buttoned shirt tucked in at the waist. She had wrapped her neck in a padded scarf to isolate the lingering chill of the outside world from her bloodstream, and out of practically, she had tied her hair tightly at the back away from her eyes. Now she was ready for a conflict if necessary. Reminding herself of the unusual plat from her dream, she had made a concerted effort to adorn herself with a typical ponytail, not wanting to add further reminisces from the lucid imagining. 

She still hadn’t slept, the tension of her deception the previous night carrying her through to the next day. It didn’t matter to her however, because today she was going to deliver justice for the murder of Rupert Meadows.

After going through their plan on her father’s blackboard, a device that seemed to change form on every visit she made to his office, now carrying a detailed blueprint of their operation, they had left for London at eight thirty in the morning. Aurora had done her best to discard the fact that Laurie’s method of expressive plans mirrored that of her father’s, it only clouded her mind on a day she needed her thoughts to be as clear as water from a mountain lake. 

Even more forebodingly, they had apparated to a pub near the phone box, called The Yellow Rose. Its ominous name did nothing to soothe her erratic heartbeat and the tension over the momentous nature of the day ahead. 

It was a smoky and dubiously legitimate eatery and a favourite of her father’s when wanting to keep a low profile. Its coarse milieu offered something of a camouflage from the wizarding world only steps away. The muggle establishment opened early doors for its routine influx of covert alcoholics and ravenous breakfasters. They had come, as their British nationality dictated, for a soothing cup of tea before the action of the hours ahead.

Aurora and Gideon had sat together and consumed their piping hot drinks as stragglers and wrinkle faced nicotine addicts came sharpish to the till, accepting portions of booze in concealed flasks and tobacco in unmarked snuff boxes. Also amongst such august company were early risers utilising the pubs cheerful pricing for toast and croissants at ungodly hours.

Though hardly the most glamorous of surroundings, it had an assured distance from the wizarding world whilst they gained their bearings. Here they could confirm their plans in confidence, whilst leaving behind the confines of their house which Aurora had begun to find somewhat suffocating.

Nonetheless, they had forgotten to go over the minutiae of the phone box; it was descending at a suspiciously glacial pace, the cogs of the lift audibly whirring beneath her feet.

She reached into her pocket, her fingers sliding against the satin interior of her coat, and took hold of her wand, in case the slowness of the lift was an unexpected abnormality. 

Aurora knew that she had to stay alert, but it was difficult not to glaze over, as the myriad uncertainties of her mind plagued her every thought. 

One thing about their plan was that it was good timing, and Aurora was suspicious of how lucky they were.

Her father had been left off the Wizengamot committee for the sentencing of Fenrir Greyback, the gavel likely to strike within thirty minutes, the first business of the day. 

The beast had been found guilty, a matter plastered across the front page of the Prophet in that day’s edition. Gideon had taken the paper from his office when it had arrived fresh at dawn, the pages still warm and the ink still shiny. He showed it to Aurora, analysing its jubilant propagandist tone. It was an odd state of affairs, as after the curious media blackspot concerning Greyback on Thursday, which was still unexplained; it was hard to know what to think. Consequently, Aurora didn’t feel the sense of triumph from seeing the thing that throttled her damned to a stint in gaol, although a tremor of fear crept through her as she gazed upon his sharp claws holding a number aloft. 

Without meaning to, she rubbed the rifts on her neck, mementos from their encounter.

As the Prophet reported, it was merely a case of confirming that sentence, though if her father’s worries were anything to go by, that may only amount to a gesture.

There was nothing on Rosier. This kept her father somewhat unnerved. Not enough to alter the course of their plan, but enough to make him slightly prickly in his demeanour. He had fidgeted a little in the pub, slurring his sentences as he rapidly fired through the dense array of syllables that clustered his observations. 

He had no idea why Fudge, a shameless careerist who disguised his self-satisfaction behind bumbling modesty, hadn’t arrested Rosier. Especially if he had been left by Aurora in the shack, and especially if as her father believed, he was vying for the top job if the people’s favourites, Crouch and Dumbledore, slipped up. With the Minister looking to retire and leave any declared war in greener hands, this was Fudge’s opportunity, and letting Rosier go was completely inexplicable, as was covering it up which he had somehow achieved. Gideon had told Aurora that there were no reports from any of his colleagues or contacts about the raid of the Shrieking Shack. Despite the fall in his legislative influence at the Ministry, he remained highly connected and this absence in his knowledge seemed to trouble him.

What Aurora also understood, now on the cusp of December, over a month since her return home, was that the Ministry had a limited raison d’etre. They couldn’t un-kill the people whose lives Greyback had taken, or mend the families he had torn apart. All they could do was battle growing perceptions in an effort to regain societal control. Aurora reckoned that the fear of impending war and magical doom was considerably more manageable for the Ministry if it led to people clinging to the institution for support, like the crutch of a wearied man. If chaos caused people to question authority instead, then the problems of an escalating civil conflict with the darkest wizard of all time were only escalated. It was a nice theory, if troubling, however as her father pointed out – the Ministry was far too ramshackle and mismanaged to act with such autocratic assertiveness. 

A long term solution, of removing the stigma of werewolves and integrating them into wizarding kind was very much a non-starter. It had amounted to treason in some people’s eyes when Dumbledore suggested it in court three months ago. He had fought against new legislation, Gideon said, preventing werewolves attaining employment in care roles, and also the embargo on the newly discovered Wolfsbane Potion. The momentous discovery was shelved on the grounds of “safety”. The danger of altering people’s conceptions was one that the Ministry feared to take.

Greyback’s sentence would merely be a way to suggest authority and control. They would boast of clamping down on criminality, of creating opportunities for peace in troubled times, whilst denying the chaos and the looming figure of You-Know-Who who had poisoned society with a hitherto unseen fear. As long as the fear brought them to rely on the Ministry and beg at the heels of their authority, rather than to rebel, it was a perfectly tolerable fear to handle. 

When her father had accepted the paper in his office that morning, another owl had arrived at the window, carrying a note from one of his friends. The Vigilant had protested again. An isolated, disparate pack had broken in and occupied the enchanted fountain, holding banners aloft, demanding Greyback was killed for his crimes. According to her father’s contact, they were swiftly dealt with by an armed legion of Ministry officials, who had arrived early to guard the courtroom during the sentencing of the most notorious werewolf of modern times.

These issues however, were nothing compared to her dreams. 

The previous day she had been able to put the troubling illusions to the backburner, consumed as she was with the morality of her choices. Laurie had required her utmost attention, but it had only temporarily pushed her troubles to one side, before creating new waves of festering uncertainty.

She had met a girl named Ariel, blonde haired with a curved smile like an upside down rainbow. Aurora couldn’t place where, but she felt for some reason that they had met before. Within the confines of her myopic visceral awakenings, she recalled speaking to others as well. It was hard, because although she remembered the dream, their words escaped from their lips like vapours, as difficult to grasp at as mist on a highland marsh. 

The imagining, wherever it took place, somehow in an artefact or her mind, made little sense. Most of it came through her mind colourful flashes. Her recalling of the fantastical night sky and the clear hide of the tattooed man’s horse continued to reverberate through her thoughts.

There was something about a baby, one yet to be born. Was it the same as the infant who attacked her? It had been unsettling, seeing the child with maggots consuming its open wounds, and barren holes in place of its eyes. 

Then there were the twins and the tent which correlated with the drawings her brother had scribbled across the pages on his wall. They were enough to turn anyone to insanity. What was unusual however, was like the woman of dreams past, they were not party to the Saxon warlocks. They wore boater hats and suits, whilst the demented woman with empty eyes to match the terrifying infant was in Victorian dress. 

Another troubling matter was Meridia who greeted her, and the Seer from the tent. They were part of some sort of community, probably the same as that of Barnabus, her alleged brother. The Seer had gifted her ‘power’, though she could still not understand what power this was. Surprising to her was the physicality of her experience; she could still feel the tight knots of rose plant around her wrists, rooting her to the chair. She remembered them as vividly as they style of her hair and the make-up of her dress that followed her into the vision. 

The continued focus on yellow roses baffled her, whilst the voice from the void was a contradiction. She appeared to fear Voldemort, who had possession now of most of the beaker, Aurora assumed, but also didn’t. She said he wouldn’t be able to utilise the artefact, whatever it supposedly did. Yet she would be able to. Not through her skill, but through blood, Nelson blood. 

It was an unsettling concept merely because it placed emphasis on her sparse knowledge of the family history. The reasons for the removal of their former ancestry, and previous blood purity still remained elusive to her. 

Despite considering the matter, she had chosen not to mention any of this to her father.

What the beaker, or the Seer wanted from her, and however much of a threat the evil apparitions were which troubled the voice so much remained to be seen. For now, all she could do was focus on Rodolphus Lestrange.

Though every time she tried, even now as the lift groaned further below ground, forty feet from the phone box, a tempest of uncertainty would rock the steadiness of her mind. 

Clouding her judgements further was the spectre of Dumbledore’s meeting. It was an event that had become troublingly harrowing as time had passed from her awakening in the hospital wing. Still Dumbledore remained resolutely silent, and now the nocturnal revelations had taught her enough to fear him, and to want to oppose him. He had kept her in the dark and he had used her brother. According to the Seer, he had even known details about the orb itself, which made any attempts of manipulation on his part ever the more wounding. The resistance, in whatever guise it existed, had shepherded her father from the scene, his colleagues appearing to abandon him too, no longer seen as trustworthy. Moody and Kingsley were close friends of Gideon, but clearly had no urge to seek their aid in this hour of fate. They had been relegated into the same standing as the Machiavellians at the Ministry. 

Then, lost in the morose revelry of her confused thoughts, the lift stopped with an abrupt clang of metal, like an echo off a steel drum. Aurora, formerly distracted by the discontent of the previous day’s developments realised that for a while they had been descending into nothingness, the steel and metal of the mechanism lost far above her. There were no longer walls; instead exposed air circled the isolated platform she stood on, whistling across her face.

From out of the abyss, from the darkness that engulfed her surroundings, as if hovering in mid-air stood a woman. Her figure was composed in crystal clarity, bleeding into her reality from the illusions of her nights. 

She was wearing the same straw hat and sharp suit from her dreams two nights before. No longer armed with a shovel or a pipe, she merely held aloft a garish bouquet of yellow roses in her left arm.

Standing perhaps ten feet from Aurora, she had a settled, composed demeanour, as if prepared for Aurora’s arrival. Rather relaxed, she had her other hand tucked in her pocket, whilst her face was stretched into a broad, Cheshire cat grin.

“Do you like roses?” she asked, “You remain a little too nonplussed by them to understand their significance. I’d try consoling a history book or two if I were you.”

She spoke in her moneyed tone, her received pronunciation earmarking the dialect of country gentlemen at the turn of the twentieth century. Her cut-glass accent was somewhat teasing, whilst her mannerisms were frivolous to the point they betrayed her smart, constricting outfit. It did however, seem as though she was genuinely frustrated by Aurora’s inability to recognise the frequent references to roses- as if it was her fault for being ignorantly dense.

Aurora didn’t answer. 

Initially, she was rocked with a momentary feeling of horror at how her dreams now masqueraded in front of her, affecting her equilibrium with wanton abandon. As the woman baited her however, she was ultimately more curious than anything. 

The lady sighed, and tossed the bouquet over her shoulder. As it soared through the abyss, the lady clicked her heels together like a plucky fairy-tale protagonist. The yellow roses exploded. Soundlessly and with minimal fuss, the roses split into thousands of pieces, before fluttering across the void. To the left of Aurora’s shoulder, they coalesced and spelt out the word “DESIRE”.

The lady pointed at them and said, “I’d worry about that if I were you, or at least the failings of other people. Desire can give way to all sorts of foul feelings of long wanted retribution. This doesn’t seem to be your most promising decision. I think you should fall back.”

“Who are you?” asked Aurora, cutting through her moral lecture. She was hardly going to take snarky advice from an inexplicable apparition. 

“You hear that?” said the lady, a weary tone of exasperation entering her voice, “Just like the others, always with the ‘who’ question?”

“Others? What others?” said Aurora.

The lady didn’t respond.

The fact she had commandeered or somehow debunked a Ministry lift for what had so far been a perplexing chit-chat was a disturbing realisation for Aurora. What she said about “others” only added further confusion. The alternative to the scary acceleration of developments in the past few days was that this was all in her head, and that somehow already, she had gone mad. A wayfarer into the planes of insanity. Hardly a reassuring thought.

Thus she was somewhat imbued with a prevailing sense of fear, not at the beings but at how lost this matter had made her become. On a practical level, she had integral business to solve today, and this hijacking of her time only served to make her blood boil. 

Aurora snapped. 

“TELL ME!” she shouted, vein protruding from her neck at the force of her scream, “Who are you?”

From behind her, another voice emerged.

“Typical mortals, they keeping asking who we are, even though the delicious question is ‘when we are’” it said.

Aurora swivelled round.

Her accent was identical to the lady, as was her appearance, though she spoke perhaps quarter of an octave lower in her register. It was the other twin from the graveyard. She was carrying a book, untitled and bound in green leather, not that Aurora found this remotely interesting. 

“I don’t care about when,” hissed Aurora, “I want to know ‘what’. What are you, monsters, wronged demons, what?” 

The lady was ten feet behind her as well, equidistant with her twin.

“All whales are fish, though not all fish are whales,” she purred.

“Actually whales are mammals,” replied the other twin.

“Quite the contrarian then,” she answered back.

“Enough of your poor fortune cookie wisdoms,” snapped Aurora frustrated. 

“Listen Miss Meadows,” said the twin formerly carrying the bouquet, bringing the matter back on track. “We certainly aren’t your enemies; in fact quite the opposite is a reality.”

“Which is ironic, as we ourselves are nothing aside from fantasy,” observed the other, now flicking through her book, which appeared to be filled with blank and wordless pages.

“We know your history, your name, far better than you do. All we can do is warn you that this is the wrong way. No one likes to mix peas with their pudding yet this may not always be impossible to avoid. There is pain, grave pain waiting for you today.”

Addressing her by her first name caused Aurora to shudder, for a hollow to emerge inside her chest, and arrest her motor functions. Figuratively of course, though Aurora was prepared for anything surreal to happen to her in the context of such abnormal conversation.

“I make my own decisions,” said Aurora, “now let me by.”

There was a pause as both the twins looked at each other, their glances going past Aurora, who stood there waiting for her sanity to somehow return. Then, as effortlessly as they had arrived, they vanished before Aurora’s eyes, leaving her standing on the platform alone in the colourless wilderness.

Before Aurora could take stock of these developments or find her bearings in the shapeless matter encompassing her surroundings, the world began to take some semblance of form.

Lines, like sketch marks from a pencil, appeared across the abyss, detailing walls, imprinting them into her surroundings. The etchings, silent and graceful, were as rapid as they were impressive, and within minutes the environment of the lift was vividly outlined. She had no idea what manipulated the markings to appear, or their significance, nonetheless, she now found herself at the next stage of the plan: in the main lift going down into the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic.

All she could do was dismiss the minutes before and keep her attention on the task at hand.

The lift was seemingly Edwardian in design, wood panelled, and adorned with a snag rug flooring. It was spacious, and necessarily so as a cornucopia of parchments, of all designs and sizes, fluttered above her head, addressed to various offices and attributed names. A gentle and appropriately officious hint of lemon radiated from the narrow grille against one of the walls whilst the consuming darkness that had appeared below the lift shaft was only visible in the gaps of the bars sealing the elevator shut.

How she had arrived here from the visiting lift, the narrow platform disguised as the floor of a phone box, remained something of a mystery. Aurora could only assume the twins had something to do with it. They unnerved her, unsettled her and though she dismissed their warnings, their prediction for the day ahead certainly troubled her even if she no idea who they really were.

Courtesy of the beaker: knowledge and her continued absence of it were beyond her control.

She wasn’t alone. To her left stood two women, both wearing bland yet undoubtedly expensive dress robes. One had her focus set on the wristwatch stiffly secured across her flabby wrist, muttering incoherently as the lift remained stationary. The other however, was looking directly at Aurora, perplexed by her presence there. 

“Everything alright,” she asked, pushing her curly hair away from her forehead, “you look awfully pale?”

“Me?” replied Aurora. She was a little taken aback at how forward the commuter was being in asking her questions about her health. 

Within a second however, she understood, and said nonchalantly, “Yeah I am fine, been a long morning, that’s all.”

“I sympathise,” smiled the lady.

With a groan, the lift shuddered momentarily, before shifting off the side. It set off at a wicked pace and only after Aurora reached for the chrome handrail lining the walls was Aurora able to steady herself. The memos, and two middle aged commuters however, seemed perfectly at ease with the bumpy ride, familiar with it as they would be with breakfast in bed.

They were clearly rich, though their taste suggested they didn’t express it through their garments other than wanting to prove the authenticity of their clothes expensiveness. As Aurora had noted, the robes they wore seemed of high quality, but were otherwise pretty conventional. The reason the lady to the right had been so forthcoming in asking Aurora about how health was not because Aurora had randomly appeared on the lift. Aurora reasoned that whatever her episode was with the twins, her appearance in the lift wasn’t an issue. Instead, the woman was so forward because her money meant she felt entitled to be so, and her sincerity was as empty as her manicured nails and artificial follicle kinks.

Money plagued entitlement, and Aurora was thrilled to when the lift came to an abrupt stop, and the two women both departed from the space. Managing to hold on with ease this time, expecting a sudden stop, she maintained her balance as a voice over an intercom in lift said, “Welcome to the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office.”

The bars pulled apart, exposing an entry point into a rather bare corridor. Clearly this was a department lacking in investment. 

One of the women, the one whom had tutted at her watch said, “Are you sure? I don’t really want to mingle with this sort.” 

“Relax,” said the curly haired woman, “we aren’t here to see them, it’s a shortcut to the courtroom trust me.”

As they departed Aurora sighed internally. In the same way the overweight one had demanded faster lift service, she now sought to blag her way into the sentencing of Greyback, using her connections and shortcuts that probably weren’t above board. 

Finding the lift to herself, she went to the master panel of buttons to the right hand side of the doorway. The first stage of the plan was to find a code, a code that would pass her through an entry point in the forum. Her father would meet her beyond the door, but he couldn’t take her with him. He had to use a different method to find her there. Instead, he had told one of his contacts to pass her a note. A man by the name of Arthur Weasley was meant to meet her in the atrium.

As Aurora’s finger hovered over the button for the Atrium, the floor wobbled somewhat as if rocking from the turbulence of a wave. The weight of feet pressing into the floor caused the lift to descend a couple of inches.

She turned around, one hand near the buttons of the lift, the other in her inner chest pocket, pressed against her wand.

A man with a shock of red hair, and at least a decade away from middle age had entered the lift. His genial features, and sympathetic smattering of freckles contrasted with the intensity of his hair colouring. Nonetheless, as he stepped into the lift, he had his arm outstretched, ready for a handshake.

“Miss Meadows,” he said, shaking her hand, his palm soft on contact.

His voice was as cordial and as forgiving as his appearance suggested, “I have something for you.”

He bent down and tugging at the narrow gap between his leather shoes and frivolously green socks, he extracted a narrow slip of parchment.

“The name’s Arthur, Arthur Weasley, from the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office,” he said, handing her the parchment, which was crinkled and screwed up in a way that suggested a very hasty fold. 

Arthur Weasley took one look above Aurora’s head, at the collection of pompous memos and seemed somewhat mournful none were meant for his line of inquiry. Spotting that Aurora remained a little at sea, or at least that’s what Aurora guessed, he added, “Your father is one of the few good men left in this place.”

Then, he turned on his heel and left, back into his office as abruptly as he had arrived.

Aurora realised at that point that it was Freya’s, Theo’s daughter, office too – she hoped none of what they had planned to day would jeopardise her.

She pressed the purple button on the panel, and as her father had explained to her, a handle on a golden chain appeared from out of the ceiling. It had the guise of a latrine pulley, but she knew when she tugged it that the lift would return to ‘home’, the Atrium. This was the main port of call for inquiry at the Ministry. 

Sure enough, on command, a voice over the intercom, uncannily similar to that found in the phone box said, “Travelling to the Atrium.”

As the lift dropped to the lower, larger floors below, Aurora read the parchment page. All it said was 9-3-5-5-6-9. It didn’t take a genius to realise this was the code she needed, however the significance of the figures was lost on her. She imagined it was a random amalgamation of numerals rather than a hidden message.

“The Atrium,” said the voice on arrival. 

Though she had been expecting it, her father making her aware of this poxy phenomenon earlier that day, the lift spat her out as the doors opened. A powerful expression of air knocked her to the floor and into the main hall of the Ministry. It was a defensive, though ineffective, charm meant to remind any wizard who hadn’t checked in that they had urgent need to do so. Frankly, it was a glorified rememberall, and Aurora wasn’t troubled by it. 

Rising to her feet, she straightened her back with a groan and surveyed the Atrium. 

The dormant state of the magnificent hall, adorned with glistening, colourfully tiled walls that curved from ceiling to floor and immaculate window bays that accentuated its formidable width and height, reassured Aurora. The fewer people she had to interact with the better.

After all, she was a wanted woman.

Aurora had confessed this to her father, who it turned out, was already aware. As their method involved minimal interaction with people, and because they had no intention of staying in the country beyond the next few hours, he wasn’t troubled by it, as long as she stuck to the plan. He didn’t even berate her for her foolhardiness in attracting such fevered attention from bestial creatures. Greyback was to be sentenced at nine that morn, with security and popular attention directed below ground, away from the lobby. When the prisons of Azkaban were seen as potentially in disrepute, there was no sane criminal, the only sort with the wherewithal to challenge Aurora, who would attack her while Greyback was in gaol. Brought to an escaped Greyback, alive and fresh, was a payday worth anyone’s time. At the moment however, she was of considerably less value. 

Her father had sent their possessions on to the States, where what he referred to as ‘family’ (in reality a distant cousin) had collected it. Meanwhile, their mother, guarded by the house elves as she slept in her room, still unwell, was due to travel abroad by midday. Elizabeth was either going with them or, if they failed to make it back, with her loyal servants. They had powers Aurora had been told, that deceived their elfish appearances. 

The only proviso her father had given before setting off that day was that she joined them in America. Only after establishing their safety and after finding an adequate disguise would she return to England and demand answers off of Dumbledore. She hadn’t fought the plan, accepting it as the most logical way forward. The affect however, her visions and dreams were having on her sanity, to the point they had just intruded upon her now was withheld from Gideon. She wasn’t yet prepared to go into any depth on just how serious it had become. 

The Atrium, in such a withdrawn and muted state, would normally be a cause for suspicion. The benches were empty and the fountain, crisply constructed of sculpted statue and sonorous water spouts remained vacant, its features dry and the pool only a still puddle at the feet of a dancing centaur. 

Her father however had warned her, in his office, of the muted forum and the changing realities of warfare. Now, nine in the morning wasn’t the commuter time that tradition dictated. Instead, most went into work soon after dawn, in a large procession that had no interest in dawdling. With longer hours and intense days imposed on them, the Atrium was merely a thoroughfare now. Those meanwhile, operating outside of conventional shifts, tended to have jobs so busy in the civil unrest that they spent all their time on their feet, without much leeway for convening by water fountains.

Aurora was there to register, spotting the humble, mahogany desk. It sat alone across a swathe of tiled floor, like a solitary tree in a field. This was a metaphor that felt apt to Aurora, as any such leafy sapling would be victim to the blowing wind, exposed on the naked expanse of wheat or grass. The desk was also victim to the wind, with even administrators falling foul of whichever way politics dictated discourse. 

On a throne like, padded chair that contrasted markedly with the beaten, and undersized table it sat behind, was a witch armed with a sharp quill and even sharper tongue. 

As Aurora approached, her feet clacking on the floor as if wearing high heels, her steps echoing across the barrel-hole ceiling, she looked up from the table and said, “Yes?” in a high pitched snarl.

It was a certain contrast from the disturbingly honeyed tones of the lady speaking in the lift and the phone box. 

Aurora studied the witch stopping three feet from the desk. Her hair was wrapped behind her head in a bun, so tight her skin seemed strained across her cheekbones. Meanwhile, the position of her eyes and oddly broad face made her look a little like a toad. This was uncomfortably offset by her pink, showy clothing and knitted scarf. The pictures of kittens on her desk were abrasively cute, especially compared to her demeanour which was rather surly for a service role.

Perhaps she was disappointed to be disturbed from her paperwork, thought Aurora. 

The woman had probably been assured that, with Greyback’s trial, she had a trouble free morning in the Atrium to work during her shift. After all, few had any interest in lingering there. 

Gideon had told her to say “Charity Function” in the lift, however, there was no such thing occurring at the Ministry that day. It was merely an excuse that the validator would have found acceptable. The phone box rarely relayed information to central offices, but Gideon wanted to make sure it had no way of assuming she was there in any sort of role involving him. 

The witch in front of her, however, who Aurora needed the approval of to pass into the Ministry without suspicion, would see her pink badge referring to a “Charity Function” and probably deny her entry. 

“State your business today,” said the witch, who Aurora now saw was wearing a silver insignia, that said “Umbridge”. It also stated that she worked in “Magical Law”. Aurora imagined that under staffing pressures, “Umbridge” had been forced to moonlight as a secretary. It was wonder she was in such a corrosive mood.

Aurora had no time for sympathy. As soon as she began to peer across her desk, trying to ascertain the scrawl on Aurora’s pink badge, Aurora took hold of her wand and thought the word, “Imperio”.

With complete immediacy, Umbridge’s stretched skin sagged, drooping below her cheekbones whilst her eyes became vacant, staring into an obscure abyss. Her quill dropped from her grasp, rolling across the table onto the floor. Aurora glanced around to confirm the Atrium was otherwise empty, taking note of how the cats in the witch’s photographs were now glowering at her.

She hated herself for doing it. After all, Laurie’s use of the Cruciatus Curse had been the deal breaker in their partnership. Yet that morning, half of the two hours she spent in her father’s office, the time used when not observing the maps and charts on his blackboard, were spent practicing the spell. Aurora had struggled with it, finding the magic so ghastly to properly comprehend but eventually, she had accomplished it to a level her father was satisfied with it. “You will sign my wand as registered,” said Aurora, trembling through her command.

She had her wand pointed at Umbridge, wavering across her fingertips. Aurora was struggling to keep her arm steady.

“You will not attempt to check my wand, rather you will write down its properties and leave it that. You will not remember me arriving. You will approve of me, without assessment.”

Aurora had feared that, especially with her knowledge of the curse so limited, the woman might try and fight the curse. The compulsions placed upon her were strong enough however and she acquiesced to her demands. 

Within minutes, Aurora was waved past the desk, and beyond the fountain of the Atrium to the lifts at the far end.

She had little choice. The lifts behind Umbridge, to government departments of renown, were protected by magical enchantments that would alert authorities to any such unregistered entrants. It was the only way, no matter how much she felt her morality wither away like old pieces of fruit. 

Perhaps there was a difference between her and Laurie, in that he had cursed Rosier out of a genuine relish whilst she had wobbled her way through a necessary action to bring justice to her brother’s killer. Sadly, to her those arguments seemed little more than semantic nuance, as at least Laurie had been hurting Death Eaters rather than random members of staff.

Feeling conflicted over her decision; she pulled a galleon out of her pocket. Turning back to the fountain, she threw it in, hearing it hit the bare stone. There was no water to catch its fall, but the charitable, minimal gesture she hoped would bring her some luck. 

Aurora then walked towards the lift, and found herself in a contraption identical in design to the one that had spat her out. She turned to the dials and typed in the code.

Through the speaker grille, the same, autocued voice now said, “The Department of Mysteries”.

A host of floating parchments soared out of the lift and into the Atrium, leaving Aurora in solitude. It was as if they were put off by the choice of venue, a confused abstract space of magical exploration.

After an interrupted but dizzying descent, Aurora arrived; a little weary from the slaloming cabin that had taken her there.

Here, the air was thinner, her throat savouring every breath, with exhales caught in her throat. Breathing in slowly, she stepped out of the lift, which sharply reversed as soon as both her feet touched the floor, skyrocketing out of the hallway and into the darkness behind her. 

The corridor was tiled, dingier than the Atrium. Though it was designed in a similar taste, with torches firmly secured to the walls. They emitted purple, odourless flames. At the far end stood a door, also tiled, so that it seamlessly threaded into the walls. Only its bronze handle, appearing in the middle of its circular design, exposed it to her vision. The walls were shaped around this entry point, giving the room a barrel design, almost like the inside of a wand. 

As she was deliberating how to approach, knowing she had taken a back entry to the department, her father appeared from out of the wall. His face materialised from the tiles, and then shortly after his body coloured the decoration of the wall. Soon he evolved into physical form, there in flesh and blood.

“A little trick,” he explained, cracking his knuckles. “I arrived before you did, and wanted to keep watch, this was my best disguise.”

“You will have to show it to me some day,” Aurora smirked.

“Come,” said Gideon, pointing at the door, his tone becoming serious once again.

It wasn’t a conventional door, its abstraction amounting to more than its shape. Gideon, when in reach of the handle, stopped and said, “It won’t open for me.”

“Huh?” said Aurora confused.

“Just trust me, put your hand on the door.”

Aurora obliged, and felt a proud, sonorous female voice boom through the recesses of her mind, “Hello, fellow Raven, welcome, welcome. I see you even bought a guest. This garden was intended as a learning haven, an intellectual idyll for the more dignified sex.”

Aurora remained silent, utterly nonplussed. 

“I do however; have no control over what choices you make and the company you keep. Seeing as the pair of you are ravens….”

At this point, Aurora looked over at Gideon and saw that he had been looped into the conversation as well. He was tapping his fingers against his side, like he always did when mulling over matters of supposed import. 

“I will acknowledge your judgement provided you can answer me this riddle, to prove your worth.”

Aurora gulped, it had been years since she had endured the daily grind of mastering fresh, hourly riddles at Hogwarts, and ever since she had left she had made an active effort to switch that function of her brain off. 

“Your father cannot help you,” the sonorous voice said, “This riddle is a memory, a recollection from your life. Like any entering the garden, you must expose your own character if you wish to pass.”

Aurora didn’t like the sound of this, but did her best to put her uneasiness to one side, “But if I get it right,” she said, “you promise to let us through?”

“Of course,” the voice replied with sigh, “I swear it on my name. My garden is open to all female Claws who prove their worth. With male guests so be it. I! Ignatia Wildsmith, promise this o be true!”

Aurora couldn’t help but giggle, her concern over male guests was apt to her character, as Ignatia was a known misandrist, “I am talking to the inventor of Floo Powder?”

“And much else besides, including the Ignatian Gardens, where you need to go. Now, are you ready for the riddle? This challenge is a vital test for any girl wishing to visit the centre of my inventions and trades.”  
“I am ready.”

“Good.”

After a pause, the riddle, repeating itself like the chorus of a song reverberated across the horizon of her mind.

“Who makes it, but has no need of it.

Who buys it, but has no use for it.

Who uses it but can neither see nor feel it.

What is it?”

She allowed the maze of words to dance around in her mind’s eye, whilst her father looked on solemn, aware she was in need of space to concentrate. He couldn’t help. It took her a while, longer than she thought it would, but eventually she teased an answer from her brain. The process was awkward for her, almost like pulling splinters from her skin, done gently and with great caution in case she slipped up in her reasoning somewhere. What made it worse was how it supposed to detail themes from my own life, and when the answer trickled its way to her tongue, a grim sense of foreboding crept through her stomach. 

“A coffin,” she said finally.

It was typical; it was another hurdle with a grim poetic edge. The riddle had focused on death and mortality, themes that had been lingering within her for too long.

The wall gave way, sliding inwards. It exposed an upward tunnel. Aurora squinted as glowing light poured into the passageway, its intensity startling her senses. Black dots danced in front of her eyes. She swayed momentarily before, after a few furious blinks, her vision returned to its former clarity. 

“Let’s go,” said Gideon. 

They were at the Department of Mysteries for a reason. 

Yesterday, when Aurora had resolved her dilemma with Laurie, her father had acted for the first time in months, rather than stewing in self-pity as he had done for the weeks before. He had been at dead ends in his investigation of Rupert’s murder until Aurora’s but now with some vigour in his stride he cornered Mundungus Fletcher. After a few squeals, Mundungus sobbed the location of a snatcher’s den, where Gideon cornered Walden MacNair, a Death Eater. Defeating him in a duel, he had demanded to know where he could find Rodolphus Lestrange. According to MacNair, which Gideon corroborated with thorough occlumency, he was due in the Ministry the next day. He was there to collect information off of a spy, whose name was unrevealed. They worked for Voldemort in the Department of Mysteries. To relieve suspicion and to equally share the burden of guilt, a different Death Eater would collect his findings from the Ministry every week in a specific location. Voldemort and the Unspeakable never met in person, in fear that the Ministry might discover their link. Instead he placed information for the arriving Death Eater to find and bring back to his master.

Gideon had little choice but to leave Walden MacNair alive, out of a case of conscience. Nonetheless, he had obliviated his memory for good measure, and according to rumours, he had been carted off to St Mungo’s hours ago on discovery at a waste skip in Knockturn Alley. 

Aurora reminded herself of this as she strode up the tunnel, recognising the implacable determination of her father. He remained as restrained in his mannerisms as per usual, however there was no doubt he was walking faster, his face taciturn not out of impassiveness, but weary defiance. 

Going single file, Aurora with her wand out behind her father, who marched in front, his hand clutching his chest pocket, they made their way to the exit. She squinted again as the glow of light continued to jar her senses, beaming off the floor. 

Her father had warned her of the possibility for the absurd.

The Ignatian Gardens were a creative thought experiment, expressed by a batty but irrepressibly talented witch. Consequently, they had to expect the unexpected.

This sentiment became particularly prevalent when they stepped out from the threshold of the tunnel. 

What greeted them was a desert: vast and unforgiving, composed of harsh, trampled dirt and a merciless arid heat. The warmth was so tangible that steam from boiling water below ground rose from the cracks in the earth. For a garden it was rather mercilessly bear with no florae or faunae visible to the naked eye. A beaming sun, of an intensely orange hue, lit up the flawlessly blue sky, seemingly almost chemical in complexion, flames spitting onto the ground. 

They had entered through a covert back entrance at the Department of Mysteries, with Weasley having the code at hand after Gideon had called in a favour. The gardens and the preservation of Ignatia’s voice at the entryway were tightly kept secrets within the Ministry, but as Aurora looked across the seemingly endless desert, she failed to understand why. 

She turned to her father, “This is a garden?”

“What was the answer to the riddle she set you? I was trying to keep out of it,” replied her father, removing his coat to the heat of the day and slinging it over his shoulder.

“A coffin…” said Aurora.

As soon as the word left her lips, branches broke through the dirt, weaving their way across the ground. In a fashion disturbingly similar to her dreams, the plant life knotted itself into dense bonds, creating walls that stretched into the upper echelons of the sky. Adorned across the plant roots were teethed heads, with tongues that hissed and spat at the ground. 

They were venomous tentacula plants.

Assembled as they were in an irregular formation, it seemed as though they were forming some sort of labyrinth.

Normally Aurora would have found such a sight alarming, but truthfully she was simply relieved no yellow roses were involved. 

“Look,” said Gideon, tapping Aurora on the shoulder and pointing to her right. 

A tower, cylindrical and built of unbroken stone loomed over the maze. Despite the intensity of the sun and the height of the structure, no shadow crept across the tentacula plants.

Gideon had told her that Ignatia had never completed her self-feted gardens.

Originally existing within the deeply magical confines of a portal, the garden had been taken by the Department for both study and societal safety. It had been locked underground for seven centuries. Even in its bare and vastly uncomplete form, lacking the oceans, cities, and mountains of Ignatia’s imagining, or the Chimaera sanctuary (a species on the verge of extinction at the time), a formidable deposit of magical knowledge existed within the realm, which had the potential to be abused.

The gardens weren’t incomplete by choice. Her father had said it was Ignatia’s attempt at a school, one for witches only. It had been a passion project. The great old witch had built a formidable maze to test students on their logic, intelligence, magical prowess and herbological skills. Herbology had seemingly been her first interest, and Gideon said this was her attempt to rival Hogwarts, an institution in its relative two-century infancy at the time. 

Gideon had however forgotten to mention that she later went on to invent Floo Powder. Thus at the door earlier, Aurora had only just realised the woman in question was specifically Ignatia Wilde. 

Ignatia had developed a love in her middle age for a young girl. It had strayed beyond the bounds of decency, and thus she was forbidden from teaching ever again. She left the garden in this state of limbo, with its tower and dense maze, whilst her warlock friends covered her misdeeds on the proviso she aided them in their research into transportation between wizarding realms. Ignatia had been an undoubted expert in nearly every academic field, and it was only a matter of time before she then revolutionised the world with Floo Powder. 

“Right,” said Gideon, “as we prepared earlier, you watch my back.”

There was a pause. Sweat from the sun trickled down Aurora’s neck. 

She was overwhelmed, frozen in the realisation of what they were about to achieve. It was a marked contrast to the temperature of her skin. 

Unable to tremor a sentence from her lips, her father momentarily stumbled over a course of action before breaking his façade of unequivocal composure for the first time that day. He reached forward and grasped her shoulders in a consuming, paternal hug. 

“I love you, alright?” said Gideon. 

Aurora sunk into his chest. 

There might not have been time to do this later.

“How long have we got? Before it begins?” asked Aurora trying to play it cool but bubbling inside with a deranged delirium of emotions.

“Many minutes hopefully, I am sure of it.”

Aurora dabbed her eye, before turning back to look at the tower. 

“Good luck Dad,” she said, stretching her face into a gentle smile.

Gideon nodded before saying, “Give me the signal when you are ready alright?”

Aurora turned away, leaving her father hovering at the entrance to the maze.

Obviously, somewhere within that structure, probably at the centre, the Death Eaters would collect their information. It was a smart move, with the hissing plant structure putting off any wayfaring explorers whilst its very location was hidden from all but the Unspeakables. The move wasn’t smart enough to ward of Aurora and her determined father however. 

It was a short walk to the tower, across flat ground. As she made her way to the tower, the sheer scope of the desert (which still remained almost entirely bare), became very much apparent. If Ignatia had initially sought to fill the realm she had created, then the school would have been the size of a continent. 

The tower had no door; its entrance was a hollow arch, and a conventional winding stone staircase took Aurora to the top with little fuss. She found herself at a stone balcony covered by a roof, and obscured by battlements. 

From there she observed the maze.

It was oblong in shape, and the vicious plants were consistent in their ferocity and number. At every dead end, a solitary, irate plant could be seen raging in the lurid heat. In the centre of the maze, observable from her position, was a pensive. 

She could see that the liquid, coloured in a pale ethereal hue, was filled with vapours of memories gone by. To the right of it was a succession of scuffed footprints. With the help of insiders, Death Eaters must have transported themselves to that spot, avoiding the difficulty of the maze. There they probably siphoned the information given by the traitorous Unspeakable before heading off again through some sort of special apparition.

It was crude, but effective.

The maze meanwhile, with its vicious challenge of threatening flowers and the logic of winding corridors, was probably some Ignatian metaphor for the true value of knowledge with the pensive sitting in the centre. The Death Eaters however had bastardised the system, probably hoping the maze would deter anyone from entering.

Aurora needed to signal to her father. Before she did however, she reached into her pocket, and attached a device to her wand. Made of jagged metal, it clasped around the maple tip, its yellow and black hue reflecting momentarily off the light.

At about three inches long, it was essentially a dart. 

Aurora had used them to stun powerful beasts such as Gryffins during her expedition days. They were filled with a toxin that gave them a significant advantage over traditional wand spells. When fired from the wand, the dart would penetrate the skin of a magical beast and nullify the magical properties in the blood. Its effect was temporary but in essence it would significantly diminish the strength of any attacking beast, and make it less resistant to conventional spells. 

Their plan from this point was simple. Her father, armed with a mirror, and exceptional magical talent, would find his way through the maze, whilst at this distance she would observe the tunnel and aid him from above if he was attacked out of the blue. When he made it to the centre, to the pensive he could as of yet not see, he would wait for Rodolphus to collect the freshly poured memories. He was likely to just appear in the middle of the maze and when he did, she would fire the dart from her vantage point. The shock that the dart would administer to his blood would effectively incapacitate him and prevent him from fleeing, whilst her father could do the finishing blow. 

Then before the Ministry sentencing of Greyback finished, they would return home and flee for America. Soon after, she would look to return for answers.

Her father could still see her. He had not yet entered the maze and Aurora wasn’t ducking down. She gave him a thumbs-up, realising the danger of wading into a forest of venomous, death plants, hoping that all would go to plan.

Within a mere matter of minutes, they would be within feet of her brother’s killer.

For a fleeting moment her mind went back to Lola, the dead sister of Laurie. Rather whimsically she also thought of Theo her long-time companion who at mid-morning had probably just shuffled out of bed in his dressing gown and slippers.

Any concern she had for her father turned out to be misplaced. 

In the turbulence of her mind’s inner trappings, and the clouds of confusion that had permeated across the past few weeks, she had forgotten just how exceptional her father’s talent was.

He waltzed through the maze, battling off vicious, reaching branches of tentacula, cutting through their mouths and venomous tips. With his mirror, as if using the sun for geometrics, he faultlessly waded through the subtly designed corridors, missing all the dead ends. Gideon swerved away from the intermittent swinging vines, unflustered at how momentously long the route to the centre truly was. The maze wasn’t gargantuan in size yet it was layered and set out to maximise the hideousness of its plant-life. 

Eventually, Gideon reached the gauntlet: a narrow central tunnel to the middle, which had venomous plants lining the walkthrough. He would almost have to slalom to reach the end of the maze. Gideon would unfortunately have to do all this to get out, however, she was relieved that he had clearly noticed the pensive, as even from above, she could see him pause as if in deep contemplation from the development. 

He waited for a moment longer, before setting off at a breakneck pace, even throwing his coat into the jaws of one of the plants, so that its cunning functions were jammed. After sliding across the earth to reach the pensive, with only his drooping hair drenched in sweat to betray his effort, he clenched his fist in triumph. He had done it.

Aurora let out a palpable gasp of relief. 

“Well done,” whispered Aurora, trying to suppress her glee, “you made it.”

Her father obviously couldn’t hear her, however simply confirming his success out loud was gracefully reassuring. The catharsis of him reaching the centre of the maze had eased her worries. It did little however, to relieve the streams of sweat running down her chest. The intoxicating heat plastered her shirt to her ribcage, perspiration seemingly gluing it in place. 

The stiffness of her clothing made it difficult, but Aurora checked her pocket once more. She had packed a spare dart if she missed Lestrange on his arrival. Relieved to find it there, she went back to studying her father, who was waiting by the pensive for Rodolphus to arrive. 

He seemed calm and composed, if a little thrilled at his successful exploits. There seemed to be a slight skip in his stride before he settled down, standing across from the pensive. With his wand raised, pointing at the series of scuffed foot prints, he waited for Rodolphus to arrive.

With a laser focus, Aurora crouched down below the battlements, pointing her weaponised wand at the centre of the maze. She was ready. 

For minutes, in baited breath, her wand hovered between the battlements of the tower. A giddy thrill at the violence to come, an uncomfortable kick that had enveloped her emotional registers, began to consume her thoughts, outweighing the nervous unease. Her arm was tingling, as if consumed by pins and needles.

Her focus was on the pensive, on the scuffed footprints nearby, and on her determined father, at the scene to pounce on Lestrange.

What she hadn’t taken into account was who had just entered the maze.

A blur of movement flickered across the corner of her vision, veering past the edge of her left eye. Anxiously, wand still pointed at the pensive and her unaware father, she did a double take. Turning her head to the left, she tried her best to focus on where she had seen the impression within the maze.

At first she had assumed that for some perverse reason, Rodolphus had entered the garden n foot. What she hadn’t gambled on however, was that she had been followed in. 

Appearing in the maze, rifling across the first few venomous corridors was a black wizard garbed in finely adorned, purple robes. Striding with purpose he was making his way through the maze, whilst her father remained at the pensive completely unaware. He was instead pointing away from the gauntlet, and still at the footprints surrounding the memory feature.

It wasn’t just the shock of another wizard endangering their plan that startled Aurora, causing her to almost drop her wand onto the sand below, but the ramifications of it. 

She recognised the man.

It was Kingsley Shacklebolt.

A close friend of her father’s.

Following him up were two other wizards, now entering the maze. One she recognised from the funeral, now wearing jazzy robes rather than a mournful suit was Dedalus Diggle, the other with a characteristically pale and gaunt face appeared to be one of the Bones family.

They were both Aurors.

Aurora had no idea what to think. Despite that reality, she thought it was unlikely the Ministry would try and ward off vigilante justice with just three Aurors. A Ministry judge that they wished to discredit acting illegally would be an opportunity the organisation would seize upon instantly. They wouldn’t publish it, for fear of undermining public confidence, but behind the scenes a covert imprisonment of a thorn in their side would have been a welcoming prospect.

The Minister was not the only one who had relations with Aurors however. Aurora was convinced she knew who was behind this.

Dumbledore, she cursed.

Perhaps she had been followed without her realising it, and in their vainglorious sanctimony they were here to dissuade her father from acting rashly? 

She thought they were unlikely to be here to help. Anger, comprising of an embittered, caustic rage echoed through her very being. 

This was Dumbledore’s work. He had kept her in the dark, he had used her brother, he had sought artefacts of magical but dangerous renown without explaining his reasons, and he had lied and cheated and omitted ever since she had returned home. She had no comprehension of what the Resistance were up to, what his plans were, and no longer could she take being told to wait and let others find justice for her brother. That was why she was here, and now he had sent men to mess up her fathers’ plans and endanger both their lives.

Aurora had no choice. Out of instinct to protect her father, and to ensure she was ready to kill Rodolphus if necessary when he himself arrived, she turned to her left and aimed for Deadlus Diggle.

It was time to send that old fraud a message. 

Whatever he was planning, he was not going to deny her justice.

“Put the wand down, Rory,” said a voice behind her.

It was an unfamiliar voice, but Aurora could guess. Dumbledore tended to employ the same yes-men. Or women in this case. 

The voice had spoken in kindly tones, lacking any sort of threat or contempt, but this only infuriated Aurora further. She also resented the use of colloquialisms. Only her friends called her Rory.

This only served to rile her.

“No,” Aurora seethed.

“I won’t ask again,” said the voice firmly.

Aurora could feel it, the wand pointing at her exposed back from only six feet away, at the top of the tower. The breath of the bearer, even in the unrelenting heat, travelled across her exposed neck. She could feel their tenseness, their readiness. They had her. 

She weighed her options as rapidly as her sluggish, heat-troubled mind would allow. 

Aurora cursed inability to hear the woman enter the stairwell, the noisy and loud stone set of steps that climbed to the top of the tower, she realised little choice remained to her. Due to her own failings of concentration and hearing, she had two choices. Comply, or fight. 

She took another look at her father, still waiting by the pensive. 

If only there was some way to warn him too, she despaired.

Enraged by the developments below, she swivelled on the spot as sharply as she could. Wand at shoulder height, she rotated one hundred eighty degrees. There was no need to think of a spell, the dart in her wand would expel from the wand tip with a single flick of her wrist, jarring her opponent with its powerful toxin. 

However fast Aurora sought to be, her speed being an admirable quality of her wand-craft, she wasn’t quick enough.

As she rotated to face the intruder, her wand poised, her wrist beginning to turn, a wordless expression of energy built within her hand. Her wand flew from her finger tips and into the waiting hand of Alice Longbottom.

Aurora had been bested by a rudimental disarming charm.

She had expected it was Alice.

Curly haired and slight in build, she had an unusual physique for an Auror, whilst the look on her face of utmost sympathy and sorrow, continued the contradictions. Despite her appearances, she possessed an immense well of power, and a sharpness that had betrayed her soft looks.

Standing there humiliated, her face turned away from the opening out onto the maze, she sucked in her chest, as Alice strode toward her, both wands pointing at her sternum.

Footsteps could be heard on the stairs, followed by a ragged, panting pattern of breath.

“It’s alright,” called Alice over her shoulder, “the situation is under control.”

Amadeus stepped out from the staircase, his own wand aloft. He was another that she had fled from at some point in the past few weeks.

“You stupid girl,” he said, pointing at Aurora.

He was speaking with an open element of contempt. The words were spat out, which uncomfortably juxtaposed with his rich Atlantic baritone and crisp diction. 

“Up yours, you son of a bitch,” hissed Aurora. 

The next thing Aurora felt was a sharp sting, and the reddening of her cheek as blood danced to the surface of her skin, which tingled from impact. She staggered momentarily, before getting her bearings. 

Amadeus had slapped her.

“Watch your mouth,” he snarled afterwards.

Alice looked on concerned, but didn’t intervene choosing instead to peer out into the maze. 

Aurora laughed flippantly, “If what concerns you is my language I think your priorities are in the wrong place my yank friend.”

She continued, “We are here to bring Rodolphus Lestrange to justice. Have you lot followed us here, is that what this is, some sabotage?”

Amadeus grabbed hold of Aurora’s lapel and brought his face centimetres from her own. His nose was pressed into hers, whilst his seemingly magenta eyes bore into hers with some venom.

“We are here, little child, because your father continue to mess up,” he growled. “Dumbledore, despite your babyish cries and hurt feelings, has been tracking down Rupert’s killer for weeks. We all have. We discovered Rupert’s killer days ago, and this was our opportunity to take him out without causing a horrendous scene. Your father was left out only because he has become increasingly unpredictable, whilst you were told to wait before meddling in our affairs until you were ready. Didn’t he say he would explain it all to you once Rodolphus was taken care of? You have too much skin in the game to be involved in this case, as we can see.” 

Amadeus let go Aurora’s lapel. The removal of his hand was like a pushing movement, which caused her to fall backwards, slumping against the wall.

Aurora was seething, whilst her rib cage rose from the erratic pattern of her breath. If what they said was true, and that they had been tracking down Rupert’s murderer the whole time, there were plenty of questions to be answered. She had no idea about the significance of Ariel’s Beaker, or the nature of Dumbledore’s methods. 

Amadeus continued, “How long before Rodolphus arrives, Alice?”

“According to Bones, who is tracking him, we have less than two minutes.”

“What about Kingsley and Dedalus?”

“They will be at the gauntlet within moments.”

Aurora did her best to peer back at the opening, worried about her father but Amadeus tugged her away from the window. 

“Don’t get involved,” he ordered. “What will happen to you afterwards is Dumbledore’s concern, but frankly my dear you have screwed this up royally for us.”

Amadeus was giving her a look of complete disdain. Aurora, forever defiant, kept eye contact. She remained completely confused, and had no plan out of this situation, but there was no way in hell that it was ending like this. 

Her father was in the maze almost like bait, with supposed friends closing in either to knock him out or simply deny him justice whilst they probably handed Rodolphus to the Ministry for arresting, or delivered the killing blows themselves. 

Too many matters, such as the Vigilant, such as the people following her, and such as the purposes of the magical artefact that Dumbledore had known of but had allowed to haunt hers and Rupert’s dreams remained up in the air.

“Oh shit,” said Alice, cutting of Aurora’s morbid trail of though.

“What?” replied Amadeus, going over to the battlements.

“We’ve….got company,” stuttered Alice. 

Aurora slid in between the pair of them. 

Standing below, looking up at the stone structure from deep within the maze were two darkly robed men, wearing silver masks that glistened under the remorseless sun. Even in daylight they looked menacing. One was stout and short, the other was broad shouldered but distinctively tall to the point that Amadeus recognised him.

“Dolohov,” he said with a gasp.

Then, the masked pair of took out their wands, and aimed at the tower.


	20. Cursed

“Get down!” shouted Amadeus, grabbing hold of Aurora by the shoulder and pulling her to the ground.

As they fell to the floor, a green burst of light soared over the ledge, missing them by mere inches, cracking the stone brickwork behind them with an audible bang. Aurora’s vision danced to a corrosive beat of tinged aqua as the spell deposited caustic clouds of dust over her eyes.

Amadeus cursed under his breath.

“Those bastards,” he growled.

Alice, who had also ducked below the ledge, turned to him and said, “What’s the plan?”

“There isn’t one,” he replied grimly, “we weren’t expecting such august company.”

His last comment was aimed at Aurora as much as it was at the Death Eaters below, who fired a second sizzling array of spells into the tower above.

He released Aurora from his grip, and peered out of the tower. Aurora rubbed the dirt from her eyes whilst Amadeus looked across to the pensive. Within seconds he was forced to cower for cover. A particularly vicious firecracker of a curse missed his nose by little more than a hair’s breadth. 

Clearly chastened, Amadeus spoke with marked defeatism, “They’re still coming in heavy.”

“What about Gideon?” asked Alice.

“He is crouched behind the pensive with his wand ready. The old fool must have assumed this was Rodolphus on arrival. Bones, Diggle and Kingsley will reach him within minutes.”

“Damn it.”

“If they are attacked by Gideon, there is every chance Rodolphus will get away.”

“Not today,” scowled Alice defiantly, her curly hair matted in sweat.

“If only the strength of your rhetoric matched the reality of our situation,” noted Amadeus, doing his best to stifle an admiring grin at the ferocity of her words behind his now weary demeanour.

With that, Aurora heard him let out a reluctant sight before stretching over the ledge again, wand aloft. Alice acted likewise to his right. Now the pair fought fire with fire, their curses and spells crashing against those of the Death Eaters below. 

At first, the eruption in conflict had bewildered Aurora, coming as it had done so out of left-field. After the first few fruitless exchanges of spell-craft between Amadeus, Alice and the Death Eaters below, she managed to retain her bearings on the debacle, and was appropriately livid.

Harrowingly, her long awaited moment of personal revenge was in chronic jeopardy, whilst the arrival of aurors (albeit shepherded in at Dumbledore’s behest) loosened any footing she had on the reality of the situation. 

She loathed their arrogance, their complacency. They had kept her in the dark for weeks, and though it now seemed that Dumbledore had fulfilled his promise in tracking the murderer of her brother, the revelations had manifested in such an ugly way. 

Worst of all, either they had been tailed by Death Eaters, now aware of their plans to intercept Rodolphus in the maze; or she had been tracked yet again. Dumbledore had probably used some of her own leads to get here. To her, there was no doubt that he had been keeping watch on her all this time, hence Mundungus’ efforts of espionage in the Leaky Cauldron and Alice’s former appearance at the Three Broomsticks. This riled Aurora, burdening her with a troubling sense of her own inferiority at playing this deathly game.

Amadeus was crashing her efforts of revenge and endangering her father in the process. She was powerless to effect this in any tangible way. Wandless, and a few feet from the ledge yet unable to peer below, she had to do all she could to maintain some sense of emotional equilibrium. 

Alice had Aurora’s wand, hastily stuffed in her pocket, its striped dart protruding from the maple tip. If Aurora had asked for it back, there was no doubt Amadeus would have said no. Meanwhile, wrestling the wand from their grasp seemed a rather dangerous premise. She may have despised the whole lot of them, even Alice with her kindly face and seeming sense of decency, but they were better than Death Eaters. Fighting two Death Eaters alone, in such a delicate situation was hardly an ideal prospect, and any distractions from the conflict at hand, such as wrestling for her wand, could easily risk the Auror’s lives and consequently lessen her own chances of making it out of here.

She needed to leave the tower. She needed to find a way to the maze before Rodolphus arrived. Aurora knew that the Kingsley and Bones were only moments away from reaching her father. It was inevitable that they would come to blows. Especially as he could probably hear the conflict surrounding her, even if it was out of her reach. 

It was a frustrating sideshow that would enable Rodolphus to escape from the ambush. 

Consequently, she turned away from Alice and Amadeus, whose attention was intensely focused on their battle with Dolohov and his grisly associate. A masterful array of hexes and curses emanated from the tips of their wands, keeping their attention away from Aurora long enough for her to attempt an escape down the spiral stairs.

Wanting to ghost silently from their presence, but aware of the urgency, she crept, back hunched, to the first step. Before she had placed her shoe on the descending stone, a sparkling bang, like a firecracker, erupted by her feet. Orange fragments of light danced from the floor, causing Aurora to jump back, her eyes meeting with Amadeus’ who had heard her efforts to leave. 

He was still at the ledge, as Alice fought valiantly on, but his wand was pointed at Aurora. He was doing his best out of probable stubbornness to impede her progress.

“Dumbledore said to keep you safe until this was over. Those were the orders, and I suggest you follow them,” he shouted. 

Aurora had little interest in his threat, instead she cut through his bravado with poisonous rationality. 

“They must have followed you in here,” said Aurora, seething from the violent escalation, infuriated that his meddling, complacency and mollycoddling had resorted in the chaotic fray beneath them.

Doubly concerned for her father, and struggling to make her voice heard over the furious spell craft, she shouted, “It’s your fault, the lot of you! You are a waste of magical blood!”

“Shut up, little girl!” hissed Amadeus, “We’re here picking up your mess.”

“Careful Amadeus, don’t say anything too sharp,” said Alice, trying to prevent the pair from coming to blows. 

Aurora did her best to restrain her vengeful frustrations, instead trying to channel her fury into another constructive way of escaping, unless Amadeus was bluffing. After all, he had quite a physical resemblance to Kingsley, bald head, strong build, dark skin, yet his talent and temperament were clearly inferior.

But still superior to hers.

This rather troubling thought was cut short of intellectual mastication by Alice, still fighting stoically at the tower ledge. 

“They’ve reached Gideon,” said Alice, warding off another curse from Dolohov.

“Who?” asked Kingsley, “Bones and Kingsley?”

“Aye, Diggle too, and Gideon doesn’t look happy.”

A sense of dread flowed through Aurora’s veins. There was no way her father would do anything aside from come to the blows with the Ministry aurors, even under orders from Dumbledore. With the sounds from the tower probably putting him already on guard, he was only staying in the maze to wait for Rodolphus. To others, it would seem insane, to keep staking out the maze even aware that not all was well in the tower where his daughter was residing. She knew however, that unlike Amadeus and the other late arrivals, he no longer underestimated her ability. He trusted her to look after herself, at least until Rodolphus arrived.

“Not much we can do there,” said Amadeus, turning away from Aurora, “I will keep my eye out for Rodolphus below, he will be at the pensive in any moment. You think you can take Dolohov and his buddy alone?”

“Going to have to try,” said Alice, turning back to conflict, twirling her wand over her shoulder. A blue helter-skelter of magic emanated from her wand, accompanied by a whistling echo, as if the spell was homing in on a target. 

Sure enough, after a momentary delay, Aurora heard the unmistakable hollow ring of magic harmonising with the bone of a human rib cage. The accompanying scream of pain that followed this impact told her Alice had hit her target. 

“Got him!” cried Alice jubilantly, “One down! Just Dolohov to go!”

“Nice work,” said Amadeus, looking down at the maze. 

Aurora, still feeling utterly powerless at the chaos emerging in front of her eyes, could only curse the next time Amadeus spoke. 

“Ah shit,” he whined, as Alice fended off Dolohov, with what Aurora recognised as surprising skill. 

“What is it?” demanded Aurora, infuriated that courtesy of their arrival, and the appearance of the two Death Eaters, there was every chance Rodolphus wouldn’t even be coming. It was probably a trap, despite their denial and Amadeus’ insistence not to give her back her wand. 

Amadeus ignored Aurora and waited for Alice to ask, “Well?”, whilst warding off another vicious hex from Dolohov.

“There is still no sign Rodolphus, but Gideon has just taken out Diggle,” panted Amadeus, ducking down under the ledge once more.

“Bollocks! Amadeus, there’s no way we should be enemies on this,” exclaimed Alice.

Sweat was running down her forehead and her fringe was skewwhiff, clearly she was flustered – both from the conflict and the mess of the situation. 

“He broke Dumbledore’s trust,” said Amadeus, shaking his head, “On this issue his mind is clouded. If we have to fight him to capture Rodolphus, then we will, and take whatever information is left in the pensieve so…”

With that, almost as if on dramatic cue, the unmistakeable boom of exploded stonework rang through Aurora’s ears, muddling her senses. Instinctively she screwed shut her eyes and contorted her body into the brace position. She was waiting for the floor to give way beneath her, waiting for the blasting curse to topple the tower. 

It wasn’t however, a Death Eater’s spell.

Instead, it appeared that the pensive had been destroyed. It had possibly been fired upon in a fit of rage by Bones, losing his cool with the situation below. Gideon wasn’t giving in. Aurora imagined he probably suspected Dumbledore’s men were impeding his daughter too, and was doing his very best to fight them. 

This was confirmed to her by Alice who announced, ‘The pensive has been blasted in two. Bones missed Gideon with a hex.”

Aurora understood the implications of this. The information Rodolphus had, in theory, come to collect was no longer collectable. It would have dribbled into the sand. That was of course, if Rodolphus was coming. It all depended on whether the other two Death Eaters had arrived after tailing Aurora or the resistance, or if all of this was one big trap.

Alice and Amadeus continued to talk until eventually, Alice said exasperatedly, “For heaven’s sake Amadeus they shouldn’t be fighting. Our main beef is with Dolohov, not your broken pride.” 

The words came to Aurora in a broken stream, her ears were still playing havoc with the words and she didn’t want to risk the wandless magic to fix it. Dolohov meanwhile was still firing at their tower, so as she made to stand she did her best both to insure the unhinged bacchanal of sound flowing from one eardrum to another didn’t affect her balance or put her in the line of fire.

Aurora knew her own vocal functions worked however, and she said to Alice, leaning in close enough to make eye contact but to avoid Dolohov’s magical offense, “Give me back my wand. I can help convince Dad to fight with you. Please, this is madness.”

Aurora was pleading to the point that tears began to crumble across her cheeks, both from the emotional heft of her begging but also the true extension of eye contact between the pair of them. It was as if the heat of the conflict had subdued to a mere flickering flame, as if time had been placed on a pregnant pause. The dark hues of her eyes bore into Alice’s. She could see her doubts of the logic of this tumultuous carnage. It was only a matter of time before the Ministry properly cottoned onto the events in one of their most closely guarded departments. The trial of Greyback wouldn’t go on forever.

Alice’s stance seemed to soften. Aurora followed her irises lower to the rim of her eyelid, as if gesturing to the confiscated wand in her pocket. 

This view was then obstructed by Amadeus’ face, carved into a defiant scowl as he pushed Aurora back to the ground. 

“I said no!” he barked. 

Amadeus wasn’t interested in her bargaining, and Aurora loathed him for his pettiness, for his refusal to adapt to the situation at hand. His cousin, Kingsley was fighting her father possibly to the death in the maze below, whilst Dolohov was firing the tower, leaving all three of them trapped. She could have helped, somehow, but yet again his pride obstructed her efforts to abate the oncoming pain. 

She glanced at her smart, almost regal attire, the dust and rubble had ruined it. She glanced at her wand, still beyond her grasp in Alice’s pocket, and she glanced at Amadeus, trapped in the shadow of his more talented cousin. 

“You really are just a bastard aren’t you?” she hissed. 

Amadeus’ lip curled, he raised his arm as if to strike Aurora across the face. His composure had been swept from his deceptively cheery features like flotsam carried by tempestuous ocean waves. 

Alice caught his hand.

“No, not again,” she said advisedly but with a sense of firm authority about the call.

She didn’t however, disobey her superior, and Aurora remained wandless. 

The fighting continued for a few more pointless, distracting seconds before Amadeus growled further developments, his wand pointed at the centre of the maze in case Rodolphus appeared. 

“Gideon’s taken out Bones too, just Kingsley left to fight him now.” 

“Think you can get a shot at Gideon?”

“Nope, even with the pensive gone,” muttered Amadeus frustrated, “he has a constant shield charm up. So does Kingsley, neither wants to play their hand.”

Aurora smiled. Her father still had it. 

Amadeus had given up on trying to interfere with the fracas, leaving Alice to continue duelling Dolohov alone. Brow drenched in perspiration, he was leaning against the wall, nonplussed by the developments, trying to think of a way out of situation Aurora felt was very much his doing.

Whatever rashness may have existed on her part, there was no way she was going to accept the blame for this mess. Her concern was very much for her father now and how he had been jeopardised by ministry meddling. His valid distrust of Dumbledore had now led to him grappling with Kingsley in the maze below, with Rodolphus nowhere to be seen. Aurora now felt sure it was a trap, and that Dolohov and his friend had come to pick them off for following a planted loose end. She could reflect on her gullibility and unresolved issues later, frankly she was sure it was only a matter of time before a Death Eater friendly cohort of Ministry wizards came along and swept them away.

Alice was still cannoning spells at Dolohov, all of which, despite their ferocity, were easily blocked. He was seemingly a brick wall, his dense bulk betraying a whip smart capability with the wand, to the point Rodolphus was deflecting her spells with comfort whilst Alice, wrists trembling, was starting to show signs of fatigue from the confrontation.

Amadeus was clearly sharing the pessimistic thoughts of Aurora, unsure whether to merely call the whole thing off and find a way out of here. 

“I still can’t believe how much Gideon has screwed us over here,” he eventually said his bitterness consuming every syllable. 

The Resistance may have been an honourable attempt of preserving wizarding society at its conception, however here she now saw it for what it was with every bead of swat descending from Amadeus’ face. It was fallible, petty and utterly limited, and outmatched by a mere Death Eater and her father, a dissident to the Dumbledore cause.

“Amadeus!” cried Alice.

“What is it?” he said, turning back to the tower ledge with a swish of his cloak.

“Rodolphus! He’s here,” said Alice, a tangible hint of revelry permeating through her voice. 

Sure enough he was. 

Aurora peered over the ledge to see a third Death Eater arrive on the scene. Emerging behind Kingsley was a short man, slender with wavy and surprisingly well manicured hair. For whatever reason he wasn’t wearing the mask of his cult and came bare faced, appearing in the central chamber of the maze. Kingsley and Gideon had dropped the pretence of cautious warfare and were now battling with their heaviest artillery, magic of thick, sonic beams of spell craft. It exposed the true nature of her own father’s magical power in a way she had seldom seen before and had forgotten about during the previous few weeks where he had appeared so diminishingly weak and bitter. 

They were fighting to an almost standstill, with pensive and its valuable information lost to the literal sands of time. 

Consequently, they took no notice of Rodolphus’ appearance, however committed they were to his demise, the duel between the pair of them consisted of such furious resentment and characterised the developing rift between Gideon and Dumbledore’s loyalist followers that it took preference over any outside observations. No matter how crucial. 

Aurora did her best to gather her thoughts trying to bat away the nervous energy coursing through her spine. Perhaps it wasn’t a trap after all? Maybe through her blundering, Dumbledore had followed her to the Department of Mysteries and a couple of opportunistic Death Eaters had noticed, perhaps being tipped off by the elusive spy in the department, and had attacked them when their guard was down? Rodolphus could plausibly have been operating on a different schedule to them, arriving as planned to pick up information from the now destroyed pensive. 

There were holes in this theory, such as surely Dolohov and his friend would have known that Rodolphus was due to collect information that day? Whatever the case, it did seem too elaborate for a trap and a sprinkle of schadenfreude tickled Aurora’s veins when she saw the surprised look on Rodolphus’ face. In an almost pantomime expression of shock, he leapt one foot in the air and made for an escape 

Aurora reached for her wand and realised that of course, it wasn’t there.

“Quick, give me back my wand!” she begged.

“No way,” said Amadeus defiantly, “We have this. Alice, give me cov-“

“ARGH!” 

Alice had screamed, and was now swaying on her heels, teetering over the tower ledge. Her expression had become completely vacant, as she was now seemingly unaware of the impending doom of the vast drop from the tower or Dolohov’s potent wand. 

“Alice!” shouted Amadeus.

She had been hit, it was only a stunning spell, but it was enough. 

Dolohov hadn’t fired it out of any effort at restraint, instead he had probably calculated the ability of the spell to deflect off of surfaces. It was an uncharacteristically piece of magic in a death match, yet its trajectory had surprised the powerful auror. It had hit the wall behind them and had rebounded, smacking Alice on the small of her back. 

Instinctively, Aurora reached forward and grabbed Alice’s sleeve, pulling her ailing body away from the opening of the tower before Dolohov could fire a second, finishing curse. Amadeus had taken hold of her right shoulder and they dragged her body to the back of the tower, resting it on the floor.

“Renervate!” cried Amadeus, pointing at Alice’s unconscious body. 

Nothing happened. 

“Damn it,” he complained, “Must have been a custom stunning curse, we’re going to need Pomfrey to fix her up.”

Aurora wasn’t thinking of this; her only concern was now on the probably fleeing Rodolphus. She glanced over the tower, seeing Kingsley and Gideon still battling away in the maze -oblivious to the recent development. Yet surprisingly, Rodolphus was physically creeping away from the pair of them rather than apparating from the scene. For whatever reason he had chosen to flee but not through the easiest means. Either he was panicking and not expecting the botched ambush that shabbily greeted his arrival or it was a trap somehow, to lure Aurora away. 

Whatever the case she didn’t have the luxury of pondering these options. 

She needed a wand. 

Fortuitously, as they had placed Alice softly across the harsh stone floor, her wand had rolled from her slackened grasp. It was centimetres from Aurora’s left shoe. Amadeus’ had instead been focused on Aurora’s own, darted wand, which had been tucked in Alice’s pocket. And now resided in his. 

Knowing this was her last chance to enter the fray, she took one look at Amadeus, who was edging closer to the front of the tower, trying to get a shot at Dolohov or Rodolphus. His concentration, which had an intensity to compensate his marked flaws in strategy that had kept Aurora at arm’s length during the foray, was solely focused on flaming his emotional urges. His friend had been shot to the ground, and he clearly felt inferior to the point of defiance over his inability to control this situation or even wake her up from Alice’s magically induced coma. Amadeus’ attention had diverted completely from Aurora, the girl he resented and probably saw as a liable maverick and loose cannon. 

What a hypocrite, thought Aurora.

The momentary slip up was all that Aurora needed. 

Making a snatching movement with her hand, the limit of wandless magic she felt comfortable of achieving under duress, the wand wobbled momentarily, rattling against the ground before soaring into Aurora’s grasp. 

The sound of the ash wood hitting her palm diverted Amadeus’ attention back in her direction but before he could even register an expression of shock or comprehend his error in not taking Alice’s wand, Aurora twirled the stick across her fingers.

“Petrificus Totalus!” she yelled.

The spell took affect instantly. 

Amadeus’ face was frozen in a disconcertingly rigid pose, caught as it was between the expression of fury at Alice’s injury and the shock of Aurora holding her wand. He had one eyebrow raised, and half his lip curled into an angry grimace. Sure enough his wand clattered to the ground, but as he tipped face forwards she knew he was struggling away to think of the non-verbal counter curse which, in the recesses of his mind, he probably knew. 

To avoid the risk, she stabbed her wand in a sideways direction and said, “Deprimo’.

A phantom gust of wind lifted him from the ground and blew him against the side of the tower, knocking him out cold. It was ugly, the sound of his body echoing off the stone was an abrasive one to the ears, an unmistakeably painful collision. But Aurora couldn’t risk subduing him only through magical means, she had to knock him out too. 

She regretted its force, the painful clash causing a probable fracture to his skull. His stiffly posed body was dented with a bloody gash on his scalp. 

But he would live. And now she had to do what she could to reach Rodolphus.

She crawled to the tower ledge, taking her own wand from Amadeus on the way. Expecting Dolohov to be primed for her emergence she had taken both wands in desperate hope of extra firepower giving her the support she needed. To her surprise however, he was gone. He was no longer on the outer edges of the maze. 

After a few panicked seconds, her eyes darting from one side to the other, she spotted him running towards the centre of the maze. Meanwhile flashes of dark fabric appearing through the dense hedges of venomous tentacula plants exposed Rodolphus’ efforts to flee. He appeared to have only just left the central chamber of the maze, whilst Kingsley and Gideon had abandoned their duel just in time. They were pursuing him as fast they could, taking care not to fire any spells in the winding corridors of the maze where any mishits could agitate the vicious plant life and potentially deform their pathway out of there. 

There was no way she could physically intercept them, leaving the tower and entering the maze would take minutes at least. Furthermore, entering the labyrinth from ground level would blind her to their position and leave vulnerable to attack. Try as she might however, the intermittent glimpses of Dolohov and Rodolphus weren’t clear enough for her to fire from above. 

Aurora only had one real alternative. 

It was outlandish, it was stupid, but it was the last hope she had of intercepting them. 

Pushing her hair away from her eyes, she turned back to Amadeus and Alice. She suspended their bodies in mid-air, encasing them in a protective shield charm with the jab of her wand. It was the best that Aurora could do to protect them from impact.

Then she positioned herself by the ledge. She crouched down, planting clenched fists against the floor, with her own wand in her left hand and Alice’s in her right. Closing her eyes, she did all she could to isolate the fracas below from her consciousness, trying to almost sense the earth below the tower. It would be too strong to manipulate the stone, but the sand underneath was ripe for picking. Thinking intensely of only the earth and the dirt, she lifted her right fist up and pointed her wand back down at the floor. 

“Depulso!” she shouted.

Unlike a common expulsion of energy, the spell drained energy, expelling air from her diaphragm with its intensity. She thought of the sand, the pebbles and the stone. Her wand manipulated it, pushing it forward until it overwhelmed the foundations of the tower. 

She held on for as long as she could, teasing vast waves of earth against the base of the structure, unsteadying its plantation in the ground. 

Eventually, the tower began to shake, before swaying back and forth. 

It was a risk, if she got this wrong she was a dead woman. Yet this was the only way to reach them in time. 

She thought of the entrance to the maze. Ideally she was aiming for the building to topple slightly to her left, but margin for error was to be expected. 

Her throat was constricting, her tongue was dry and her lungs were parched for air, but the tower was rocking with greater intensity. 

What she hadn’t prepared for, as obvious a thing as it was to anticipate, was the need to secure her own body during the severe turbulent motions of the structure.

There was nothing to hold onto, and trapped as she was in the chasm of her own mind, trying to orchestrate the trajectory of the wobbling building, she had left herself open to the consequences.

Aurora felt her knees give way. They slid on the abrasive stone, tearing through her trousers, breaking her skin until bloody gashes emerged, stinging her flesh and producing the waspish taste of salt in her mouth. With her arms unable to support her, she fell against the side of the tower, just as the building groaned forward. 

The monolithic building obstructed the sun, darkening the weaves and knots of the maze as it loomed towards the centre. 

Losing the ability to control its descent, Aurora instinctively pointed out of the ledge just as her thigh crashed violently against the wall. Ducking out the way of Alice and Amadeus, whose encased bodies rebounding against one side of the tower to the other, she stretched out her right hand and shouted, “Arresto momento.”

As planned (even if she had been unable to control the direction of the tower), its hasty descent to the ground, at a speed that would have crushed her, was halted to that of fluttering autumnal leaves. Slowly but surely, the tower made its way into the earth, affording Aurora the opportunity to reposition herself. Crawling from the side of the wall, she pushed herself away from Amadeus and Alice’s concussed bodies and pointed her wand out of the ledge again. From this sideways positon, she could make out the figures in the maze. 

All of them, to a man, had paused in shock. 

Kingsley preferred to stand still, open mouthed, his eyes following the tower as its craned into the maze. Dolohov who had fallen down in the pursuit, could only curse as it fell, whilst her father appeared to have cottoned on to what was happening. His face was stretched into a gleeful smile, which contrasted sharply with Rodolphus’ bewilderment. He was standing, somewhat hunched, with his neck craned towards her. 

“Stupefy!” she shouted, pointing her right hand at Dolohov.

He fell instantly.

Then angling downwards, holding her left arm with her right, steadying herself in an uncomfortable pose as the tower fell closer to the ground, she shot the dart.

It was a tough shot, lying on her side with the building now only ten feet from the sand. She was aiming for his neck, but missed the mark.

Thankfully, she missed by such a margin that she connected with his shoe. The striped spike penetrated through the leather, and with a grunt, he collapsed on the ground in a heap, panting. The magic ebbed from his veins, clotting, as the potency of the dart made its mark. 

She then crouched into the brace position as the tower made contact with the earth. 

It was a sternly built structure, and Aurora was certain it was magically fortified. Consequently, it was no surprise to her when the tower failed to break upon impact. Instead it sunk into the sand, rupturing the earth. The noise was surprisingly subdued, and in fact it was the harsh squeals of the tentacula plants, crushed upon contact with the formidable weight of the stone, that was the most audible.

It wasn’t enough to cushion her aching limbs however. The tower absorbed the force but rattled the insides of the walls, reverberating from the impact. Aurora was thrown upwards, knocked against the other side of the wall. This only had the effect of winding her however on her fall down she barrelled to her left. Her body was twisted into a contorted pose as she collided back with the other wall. 

She heard her right wrist snap before the pain registered. The scarred, sweaty tissue even coloured a violent shade of red before the full realisation of her senses emerged.

Then, Aurora screamed, and screamed again. Her vision faded for a second time as the violent, searing pain overwhelmed her emotional equilibrium. It didn’t matter what she just achieved, the mere isolating factor of such scintillating discomfort exposed her mortality. It was as if her body had enclosed her within those most agonising seconds, as any efforts to climb out of the tower, or to recognise what she now needed to do were subdued by her evolutionary urges to console the ferocity of anguish coursing through her. She had to somehow ease the pain. It was worse than any she had ever felt before, thought it was difficult to even acknowledge any tangible part of her identity as she rocked back on forth, or to quantify the pain, as her urge was only being to somehow resist the pain. 

It was overbearing, a persistent, dogged soreness.

She was on the cusp of blacking out. Aurora’s vision narrowed to mere slits with her sight smudging to obscure shades. 

On the throes of lost consciousness, a voice permeated the cognitive vacancy swelling across her mind.

“Don’t give up Aurora,’ said the voice.

Its tone, with the hints of the clairvoyant, crept through her mind. Its mystical tone was markedly familiar. The soothing clarity was so crisp it washed through the pain, subsiding it to mere occasional jagged spikes of suffering. 

“How did you get here?” she murmured, recognising the voice as that of the Seer from her dreams.

“You already know,” it whispered. 

Before she could enquire further, the presence was gone, withdrawing from the recesses of her mind. So was the numbness subsiding the pain, which returned to her in a crushing wave. Aurora screamed again, until her cries strained into a garrulous whimper. She looked at her wrist. The flesh had held firm yet the bone had broken to the point that her hand hung limp, at an almost right angle to her arm, like the jutting on a door hinge. The pain as tremendous as it was, did little to prepare her for the visual shock of seeing her hand in such a grotesque state.

At least it was her right arm, not her wand arm.

With her vision returning, despite the continued pain echoing through her body, she turned her head to one side and looked around. 

The tower had fallen, crashing on its side, enveloping the room in a near total darkness. The ledge, had only sunk halfway into the dirt, providing a glimpse of light into the interior of the tower. Amadeus and Alice’s unconscious bodies could be made out at the far end, a blur lit up by the reflection of Amadeus’ silver buttoned coat and animated by the sounds of their steady, muted breath. Her plan had worked somehow, they had survived the impact of the fall and remained hovering above the ground as if floating in mid-air, encapsulated by the protective ball of energy she had conjured. 

“Rory?”

Aurora turned back towards the ledge, wincing somewhat as she turned her neck. She must have strained it as well.

It was her father. Gideon had crawled through the gap, and with his wand lit up at the tip, his attention was fixed on Aurora’s maimed wrist.

He ruffled his scraggly hair before he explained, “You have broken your wrist.”

“No shit,” laughed Aurora, giggling blackly from the situation, hoping her laughs would subside the pain.

“Here,” said Gideon, tapping it with his wand.

As if cold ice had distilled through her bloodstream, as soon as his wand made contact with her skin, the pain evaporated from her wrist. It had been numbed to the point that any sensory awareness of her right limb had diluted to the point of non-existence. It felt like little more than a dead weight, a floppy muscle rested against her side.

“Anatomically, the arm is fine, I have just removed the pain.” he explained.  
“Can you fix it?” she said, trying to not sound as childish as the question suggested.

He tapped her wrist again.

With another snap, Aurora heard the bones pop into place, clicking together. 

“We need to get you out of here,” Gideon then said, furrowing his brown, “before the tentacula leaves find their way through.”

“Dad, Amadeus and Alice…”

“I know, don’t worry, they’ll take them,” said Gideon, his softened tone easing Aurora’s heartbeat. 

“Kingsley, Edgar, Dedalus,” he shouted, looking out of the ledge, “they’re here, it’s alright.”

“Where’s Rodolphus?” moaned Aurora.

“Oh, you’ll see.”

With that he helped Aurora out of the tower, pulling her away from the toppled structure. She looked up, squinting as the beaming sun diffused across her vision. Aside from the collapsed tower and a crushed row of tentacula plants, the maze was still standing. 

They were just off the centre of the maze, with the central chamber and the smashed pensive perhaps fifty yards behind. The conjured sun continued to heat the ground with its magical intensity, the granules of earth glistening from its perfect heat. 

As her father took her by her left hand away from the building, Dedalus and Edgar entered through the ledge and came out with Alice and Amadeus’ bodies over their shoulders. 

Her attention however, was on the body a few feet in front of Kingsley. 

The panting, wheezing breath of the ragged man was audible, even over her father’s voice which was reassuring her with every step away from the tower. Protruding from his foot was the striped dart, embedded in his shoe and penetrating the skin. Even now as he struggled for breath, the toxins were coursing through his body, nullifying his magical blood and exhausting his lungs of breath. 

“Now, do you believe me Kingsley?” said Gideon.

Kingsley turned momentarily away from Rodolphus, his wand however still pointed at his chest. 

After giving appreciative nods to Bones and Diggle he said, “I guess you were right all along.”

With that, Gideon gently let go of Aurora’s arm, before he looked at her and said, “Shall we do this together?”

He strode over to Rodolphus, his face twisted into a somewhat gleeful, sadistic smile. Gideon pulled out his wand, gesturing at Aurora to do the same.

“You can’t kill him Gideon,” said Kingsley, “You know that isn’t our way.”

“Don’t mess with me Kingsley,” Gideon spat, “I don’t have time for these moral parlour games.”

“It’s murder, Gideon!” shouted Kingsley.

“Kingsley’s right, he should stand trial,” said Bones, stepping away from Alice and moving towards Kingsley. 

He too had his wand out it. His however was pointed squarely at Gideon rather than at Rodolphus, who remained panting on the floor. Aurora saw that a flicker of a grin appeared across the Death Eater’s face, enraptured as he was by the destructive nature of their disagreements.

“Trial?” exclaimed Gideon, incredulous, “Trial? From this kangaroo court, this oddball assortment of corrupt braggarts and thieves. Look at the pantomime upstairs with Greyback now, can you really trust the Ministry with a trial?”

“Murdering people isn’t our way Gideon,” said Kingsley, puffing out his chest, “I know what he did to your family is awful, but at the very least we take him to Dumbledore, let him decide.”

“No. Bloody. Way.”

Gideon grinded these words out through gritted teeth.

Aurora didn’t know what to do. 

They had come to kill him, but now at the telling moment, her belief in that decision was increasingly uncertain. Sure Rodolphus was a monster who had killed her brother, and many others beside including Stacey and Lola, but the momentous nature of ending a life was difficult matter to comprehend under such duress. 

As introspective as ever, she glanced down at her previously pristine shirt now caked in dirt and sweat. She acknowledged the bruised, ragged nature of her young body, wounded beyond its years, and the state of her mind, so damaged that visions plagued her every musing. Would killing this man take even more away from here? Possibly pull apart perhaps the only thing still intact, her soul?

Clearly she was going crazy, she thought, there is no such thing as a soul.

He was there, at their mercy, the poisons corroding his magical ability and his exhausting his body to the point of total fatigue. It would be justice, of a sorts. 

Yet he was smiling. Why was that? His face, smooth and lacking in the contours of age; handsome aside from his greasy hair and lost teeth, wasn’t expressing any fear at the prospect of impending death. The closing curtain on his mortality was almost welcomed, none of this even at a dire ebb, was troubling him.

Now, she had a choice. With her own wand at the ready, she could kill Rodolphus, unifying her bond with her father though at a cost to her moral compass. She also would find it even more difficult to understand the dreams, the beaker, and the fallout from her brother’s demise if she wholly severed her relationship with Dumbledore and the Resistance, which was bound to happen if she indulged in the revenge she craved.

She sought somehow, to find a clear answer within the moral confusion. The swirling, regressive mass of thoughts that plagued her conscience offered no direct answer. After all this time she had no idea what she wanted.

“If you don’t step away Gideon,” snarled a voice from behind, “We’ll make you.”

It was Dedalus Diggle, speaking in a harshened tone that betrayed his usual jolly and smooth demeanour. 

Aurora cursed out loud. They were outnumbered, and through her dithering she had put the pair of them at a disadvantage, now that the three aurors had their wands pointing at the pair of them. 

Her heartbeat was unusually steady, instead it was her mind that was racing, so unclear, so vacant, so foggy in the decision ahead. 

She glanced over at her father for some sort of tell. 

Gideon looked determined. He had his back to Kingsley, with his wand still pointed at Rodolphus. His body language, so chillingly calm betrayed the nature of the heated confrontation. His soft blue eyes were focused on the lackadaisical demeanour of Rodolphus Lestrange, and though she was sure his mind was thinking through every scenario, there was no way he was going to let Rodolphus live.

It was up to her whether she shared in the responsibility for that choice.

The decision had to be made soon however, as Aurora knew it was only a matter of time before the Ministry stormed the Department of Mysteries and made the decision for them. 

“You have five seconds, Gideon,” warned Kingsley, his concerns clearly echoed those that were imbuing Aurora with a new sense of panic.

Her father, rather than indulging in petty insults or some sort of dramatic speech on the nature of justice, remained taciturn. His wand arm was steady, still aimed squarely at Rodolphus’ head, whose keen eyes were betraying his calm disposition at that reality.

“Kingsley, look out!”

“PROTEGO!”

Her father had turned towards Kingsley, his wand raised aloft.

With a flick of his wrist, he had blocked a jet of purple light, summoning a shield to the left of Kingsley’s neck, deflecting the curse up into the sky. 

He hadn’t turned on Kingsley; he had saved him.

Aurora just had time to register a crooked grin of admiration before she deflected a curse headed her way, a sizzling green hex that was seemingly fired from a bed of tentacula leaves.

As she stood her ground, she realised at once why Gideon had kept so unnervingly cool. 

Even in the heat of the moment, he had realised they weren’t alone.

Dolohov had woken up. 

Unfortunately, by wearing the dark attire of the Death Eaters, with its masks and armour, he had nullified her stunning curse. Rather than knocking him out, she had only succeeded in winding him when she attacked him from the falling tower.

Thus he was lying flat on his stomach below the tentacula plants, concealed from the fray. He had been biding his time to strike as they quarrelled over what to do with Rodolphus.

“Incendio,” Bones cried.

“Aguamenti,” tutted Dolohov almost disapprovingly. 

The the flame jet headed his way was extinguished a flush of water. 

“Baubillios!” barked Dolohov. 

A bolt of white light cracked from Dolohov’s wand, rapping Bones on the knee before he could even raise his wand in reply. 

It was quick, unnervingly quick, to the point Aurora heard Bones hit the floor before Dolohov finished his incantation.

Bones doubled over, before Dolohov fired a second curse that blew him against the wall of the collapsed tower. He crumpled in a heap, landing on top of the unconscious bodies of Alice and Amadeus. 

Dolohov was taking the five of them on alone, and still appeared to be a match for them. 

Aurora bemoaned her idiocy. So pleased with her success, and so caught up in the morality of her decision making, she had forgotten to even mention to her father, or Dumbledore’s men, that Dolohov was even there.

Clearly Aurora’s surprise at Dolohov’s powerful display of magic had been revealed on her face, for Dolohov’s smirk was visible in the grate of his mask. He turned to her and fired a spell.

She didn’t even try to block the curse, instead she rolled back to cover, only hearing Dolohov cry “Finite Incantetum” as Kinglsey and Gideon rounded on him. 

They were now fifteen feet away from her, near Rodolphus who remained on the ground, his was expression unchanged, as if unmoved by these developments. 

Diggle, perhaps out of some sense of chivalry, stepped to the right, towards Aurora,. He fired a non-verbal hex that missed Dolohov by a few feet, making contact with the head of a dormant tenatcula plant instead. 

With a screech, it woke from its stupor, exposing its poisonous head and widening its jaws. To either side of it, other plants woke and started to make febrile movements, as if sensing their unwelcome presence in the maze, stirring them into action. 

“Careful, Dedalus,” warned Kingsley, “We don’t want to wake the maze.”

“Bugger,” cursed Aurora, as she fought back against Dolohov’s assault again. He easily blocked her leg locker curse. 

Dolohov returned fire with a blasting curse.

“Alarte Ascendare!” he shouted, reaching out from his cover. 

“Impedimenta,” said Aurora quickly.

It didn’t do much, but it slowed the spell momentarily, just enough that she was able to pivot immediately to her right and duck for cover. 

Diggle was not so lucky, and for the second time that day, he was knocked cold, the potency of the spell causing him to fly several feet in the air before collapsing on the ground, his eyes firmly shut. 

Before she could turn to attack once more, she heard rustling from the hedge behind.

Instinctively, she swivelled, performing a slicing motion with her wand, creating a rush of air that would deflect any impending curse.

It was the third Death Eater, the nameless one who had joined Dolohov in the maze, who she thought had been incapacitated by Alice Longbottom. She recognised the hunched shoulders and stout appearance when perching over the tower earlier. 

The Death Eater wasn’t interested in her however, and merely stepped to the left as the torrent of air came his way.

Then with a maniacal laugh, and in a distinctly Welsh accent she said, “Watch this!”

It was a woman, thought Aurora.

But before she could process who this meant it might be, concealed behind the mask, the Death Eater pointed at the sky, and bellowed, “Meteolojinx Recanto!”

A purple thunderbolt erupted from her wand.

It soared upwards until it had cannoned of the artificial sun, which after a resisting flicker, disappeared with an airy pop. 

Darkness descended upon the maze, and before Aurora could reach for a spell, the third Death Eater reached for her arm and pressed above her wrist, her figure still deducible due to the glint of her armour. Then she disappeared in front of Aurora’s eyes. She had apparated out of the maze.

“Boreos” said Aurora, clicking her fingers.

At once the outline of the maze returned to her vision, though now in a dim outline rather than in the luminous, effervescent light of the sun. The colour remained faded, yet more pressingly she came to understand the motivation behind the Death Eater’s curse.

By vanishing the sun, and nullifying its heat in the process, she had agitated the plant life, the sentient, vicious guardians of the maze. Spell craft and warfare were minor inconveniences to the venomous carnivorous plants, but the deprivation of heat and light was a mortal threat to their survival. These plants had existed for a century in the abandoned play park of the madcap genius, Ignatia Wilde due to the maintenance of the magical ecosphere, to the point they didn’t even want for flesh. 

Now however, they had been provoked and Aurora could see it. The plants were stirring, the heads opening, and the buds of flowers began to agitatedly sway from side to side. This was followed by hissing and screeching of a sort that was predatory, domineering in a fashion found more commonly in wild beasts. Even more worryingly the hedges were reforming, manipulating the pathways to the side of her so the maze no longer adhered to the form they knew. They were minutes from potentially being trapped.

Thankfully she was only two rows from the tower, which she made it back to in one piece, though hearing the awakening of the plants behind her to the point she was convinced one had snapped at her heels. 

The tower had been blasted in two, presumably by Dolohov, and now Kingsley and Gideon stood together, crouched behind some of the rubble. They were still exchanging fire with Dolohov. They were managing to ward him off successfully, to the point he was retreating back through the maze, but not to the point that they were able to overpower him. 

Through her night vision, she could deduce Gideon had suffered a cut to his face, more dramatic in appearance than actual harm. Kingsley was limping somewhat, gingerly placing pressure on his knee every time he turned to shoot a spell, but otherwise he betrayed only a steely determination, an ironclad will to avenge his friends. Their injured bodies remained strewn beside one of the tower walls. 

She wanted to help them, to remove Dolohov once and for all, however, as she had returned to the fray, her eye was once more drawn to Rodolphus.

He was fleeing. 

As if prompted by Aurora’s arrival back at the tower, he had pushed off from the ground and burst into a sprint.

The dart snapped under his shoe.

She turned back to her father, he still hadn’t seen her, but he knew where she would be. If there were to be any issues, any false starts or difficulties that prevented them from meeting first at home – they had agreed to a Muggle world rendezvous. If anything was amiss, they would meet at the randomly designated Whitechapel Road station, a place neither had been before, but consequently a place no one would expect them to meet. 

It was tempting to grab her father, and to apparate on the spot, but she had to trust him like he had trusted her. He would find a way out of the maze, she knew he would. At this moment he would want her to make it out alive more than support him in an act of valour. 

More importantly, he wouldn’t want to give up on her avenging Rupert just quite yet. Whilst he was occupied fighting Dolohov, Aurora was his only hope at catching Rodolphus again.

As the maze became increasingly animated, it’s pathways narrowing, with sound of vicious tentacula heads snapping at the air, she waded through the darkness.

Rodolphus was perhaps ten yards ahead, able to maintain an impressive speed despite the toxin’s effect on his lungs. His knowledge of the maze had come to his advantage as he darted from alley to alley, firing hexes at the tentacula plants, hoping to further animate them into biting Aurora in pursuit. She ducked and swerved from the clasping jaws of the flower heads, but in the end chose to burn her way through the maze. Spotting the exit thirty yards ahead as the crow flies, she blasted a straight line through the hedges, killing the tentacula plants in her path. Unfortunately, this came at the cost of altering the pattern of the maze, to the point her father was lost behind in the engulfing darkness, still gripped in his battle with Dolohov.

Aurora was still somewhat bemused by the Ministry’s late response to the carnage in one of the most fragile and protected departments, however, it was either a case of incompetency that echoed her experience on the train only a month ago, or something more sinister afoot. Either way, her only focus could be on Lestrange, who despite taking a more convoluted path out of the maze, had increased the gap between them to nearly twenty yards.

Aurora fired a stunning spell, she missed, and now Rodolphus was angling his run from side to side so that aiming with the limited sight of her night vision became an impossibility.

He had reached the exit of the room, the corridors of the Ministry and their resolutely speedy lifts awaited him beyond the door which he kicked open with an almighty thump. She followed suit, stumbling in the sand which he had appeared to almost glide over before.

With particular emphasis on protecting her tender right arm, she slid through the gap hearing it rattle against the hinge as she entered the Ministry again. Rodolphus was still ahead of her, and was now struggling with the grilled door of the lift, prising it open with his fingers. Rodolphus pulled it across, seeing Aurora bound across the corridor after him.

She raised her wand and said, “Furnunculus.”

The spell rebounded off of the lift door, forcing her to duck as the red beam of light flew back in her direction.

Rodlophus however, wasn’t counting his good fortune, and swore as he waved his wand around in the interior of the lift. Courtesy of the poisoned dart, his efforts of magic were futile. He was helpless if Aurora could only reach the lift in time, and now she sprinted, straining her body to the edge of its capabilities, feeling the resistance against her right hand, and hearing the sound of air echoing through her nostrils.

She was eight feet away, four feet away. She could even hear Rodolphus mutter to himself.

“Come on, come on, come on.”

“Move!” he then screamed, banging the wall of the lift.

Suddenly the pleasant, breezy voice of the welcoming witch permeated through the lift.

“Next stop – The Atrium.”

As Aurora heard the lift groan into motion, with its gears beginning to grind with a turning momentum, she tucked away her wand into her coat and leapt for the barred door, her left arm outstretched.

Her hand clamped around the grille, fingers clasped on the icy steel diffusing the heat from her palms to the point that liquid trickled down the bar, before the lift took off at a whirlwind pace, departing from the wall and leaving the Department of Mysteries far behind.

She was hanging on, her left arm taking the strain as her body rocked too and throw behind her. Flares of light shone into her eyes, arresting her vision whilst a powerful sense of weightlessness coursed through her legs, her teeth chattering from the rapid pace of the lift.

There was no mechanism that guided the elevator, instead it glided through thin air from department to department, veering from one direction to the next on impulse.

Her face felt the force of these sudden manoeuvres. At first she thought to merely grin and bear it until the lift planted itself in the mouth of the Atrium. To her detriment however, she felt something knock against her left arm, landing a consistent blow just below her elbow. She could sense from its feel, its resonance on impact, that it was a human fist. Rodolphus must have been trying to knock her off the lift and into the nothingness below.

Knowing she had perhaps only seconds before her arm would give way, Aurora suppressed the manifesting panic ruminating through her chest, and made a swishing movement with her right arm. She was replicating the wand movement she had used to knock out Amadeus earlier. 

The limp limb struggled to relay her magic without her wand, and the grille merely shuddered somewhat. Rodolphus’ fist then came down on her elbow for perhaps the fourth time, and she felt her fingers slacken. Knowing she had only one more chance, she risked the possibility of losing her wand in the turbulence and pulled it from her pocket. 

With her right hand she pointed at the door, and cried “Deprimo!”

The sound of the incantation was lost over the whoosh of the travelling lift, however it focused her magic and as Rodolphus aimed another punch, the door opened, knocking Rodolphus to the floor before it closed once more behind him.

Aurora stumbled over the threshold. The unsaturated effect of the adrenalin addling her motor functions, combined with weary nature of her body, meant that she was unable to rectify her loss of footing. She fell flat to the ground in the lift. Her eyesight was still becoming accustomed to the dinge of the elevator, the furious bacchanal of light that had arrested her vision whilst clinging to the grille had taken its time to leave her retinas. 

As she made to get up, with dark spots of distortion lingering across her eyeballs, Rodolphus went on the offensive. She raised her wand, her arm swaying as she did so, but was too slow. Her left arm flapped to the ground as he kicked it from her grip. 

Taking hold of the maple stick, Rodolphus pointed it at her and said, “Crucio!”

Nothing happened.

He let out a cry of frustration, a hyena like keen, before kicking Aurora again, this time in the ribs. She collapsed on her stomach, the pain suppressing any notion of humour from the situation. A dart, such an asinine, rudimentary weapon, had nullified any sense of threat from the Death Eater. 

“I’d get off my wand, if I were you,” she then spat, expelling a splash of blood out of her lips.

Rodolphus went to kick her again, but this time Aurora rolled out of the way, raising herself from the ground in the process. As he turned, she shoulder-barged him, aiming low, making contact with his thigh before squeezing with both arms until he collapsed on the floor. 

Taking hold of her wand once more, she straddled the beaten foe, pressing her knee into his collar bone. His handsome, boyish face was looking up at her, utterly expressionless, whilst his arms were limp by each side. He was no longer putting up any resistance.

Aurora rested her wand against his neck. 

“Any last words?” she whispered.

“The Atrium” cooed the Welcome Witch. 

“What?” said Aurora aghast, looking up at the speaker phone in the lift, alarmed.

They couldn’t be there already, could they?

Before she could react any further, the doors of the lift opened with a ping, whilst several orderly notes fluttered in, relaying some sort of official business.

Meanwhile figures loomed over her, their shadows darkening the now smug face of Rodolphus face. 

One of them gasped, before the hurried sound of footsteps radiated through Aurora’s ear, followed by the presence of at least a dozen other shadows, darkening the lift to a near gloom. 

Slowly she craned her neck to her left out of the entrance of the door, taking note of the clock above the lift’s entrance. 

The sentencing of Fenrir Greyback would have finished fifteen minutes ago.

Now as many as fifteen well-dressed witches and wizards, some Ministry officials, others mere court attendees, looked at the injured man on the ground and Aurora, her face in a satisfied snarl, pointing at his neck with her wand.

They hadn’t expected this to greet them on their departure from court. 

“What are you doing, you crazed loon?” cried a monocle wearing woman.

“Holy cow, woman!” howled a goateed bureaucrat. 

“Someone sound the alarm,” yelled another as the crowd retreated back.

“Well, you’ve really blown it this time sister,” laughed Rodolphus, before punching her in the gut.

Aurora wobbled slightly, giving Rodolphus enough room to wriggle out of her grip. Aurora felt her knee give way, and she tipped backwards, on to the floor just in time to hear a shrieking siren wail across the Atrium. 

The Atrium, the grand forum of the Ministry, was consumed by a flashing red light, and Aurora could hear a silence envelop the now bustling crowds exiting the sentencing of Fenrir Greyback.

She grabbed hold of the handrail and hauled herself into a standing pose as a row of suited wizards formulated in front of the lift, their wands pointed at her. 

They were wearing the typical tweed attire of Law Enforcement. Led by Fudge, glassy eyed and somewhat clumsy in his steps, they made their way to the entrance of the lift. As they got closer she realised that aside from perhaps three who struck a steely and determined pose, they all appeared unfocused in their facial expressions. 

That’s why Rosier wasn’t captured, realised Aurora.

Fudge and his half his men are under the Imperius Curse, the rest in his group must have been either disguised criminals or Death Eaters.

Distractedly, she thought she may even have recognised two of them from school, but they weren’t there to do her favours. 

To her consternation, but now not to any surprise, they had made zero effort to follow Rodolphus Lestrange. He was striding through the stationary crowds with only the occasional mutter of his rudeness, the sole audible sound other than the alarm, giving away his presence as he escaped the drama unfolding at Aurora’s expense.

Then the siren stopped.

Instead, a short, stout witch, wearing her offensively bright pink dress trotted towards the Enforcers, her heels clacking on the marble floor, with a Cheshire cat grin enrapturing her facial features. 

It was Umbridge, the woman she had Imperiused earlier. 

“That’s her, that’s the one!” she wailed, putting on a mock expression of terror.

She was pointing at Aurora in the open lift. 

Fudge curtly nodded, he needed no further prompting.

“Arrest her!” he barked. 

“Protego!” cried Aurora, blocking the cavalcade of spells that came her way from the pack. 

Thinking fast, she looked up at the roof beams of the Atrium, the supports that were suspended below the glass ceiling above the fountain, keeping the ceiling in place.

“This better work”, she muttered, blocking off their spells with another shield charm.

“Incarcerous!” she bellowed.

Pointing her wand into the air, she had aimed for the beam.

Thick rope rapped around the girder, and before a third wave of spells came her way, she thought the word “push” distinctly in the forefront of her mind.

The force of the ropes in the air was irresistible, and her wand followed the momentum of her spell. Her second spell, cognitively conjured, supported her bodyweight as she took off from the ground, soaring out of the lift, much to shock of the passers-by.

There were hundreds of them now, in the Atrium. With the trial over, they had all arrived in the foyer ready for departing the Ministry. Yet here they were all looking up, witch and wizard alike, some with faces she instantly recognised but did her best not to process as she grabbed hold of the beam.

She was only interested in one thing: making out Rodolphus’ face in the growing awestruck crowds. It wasn’t as difficult as she thought, as it was the only face with its back to her swinging body. 

The rush, the junkie sensation of her audacious manoeuvre was fuelling her adrenalin again. It wasn’t just Fudge’s cohort now, dozens of officials had entered the Atrium, leaving behind open fireplaces.

Fireplaces, the devices for the embargoed Floo Powder travel, had been otherwise locked and out of use, except for in the cases of emergency. Fireplaces that Rodolphus was running towards, untroubled, escaping the scene. 

Without another thought, her body giddy from the reality of her situation, she blocked off a further wave of spells before pointing at the nearest fireplace across the Atrium, the one Rodolphus was purposefully making his way towards.

Using her tender right arm to cast the spell, and leaving her stronger, undamaged hand to support her hanging below the beam, she shouted “Incarcerous” one more time.

The rope made the perfect zipwire. She leapt off the beam, abseiling down the line of rope, held taut against the far wall. A stunned silence filled the room as she sailed down, only the occasional isolated wayward spell inconveniencing her descent. 

Ten feet from the ground, she leapt off of the rope which vanished as soon she planted her feet on the ground. As if mannequins or stone statues, the assembled crowds stood stationary in a bewildered blend of awe and confusion as she weaved through them, taking note of their open mouths. 

Fudge’s men hadn’t given up their pursuit however, and they were joined by a phalanx of Ministry aurors to her right, and a host of security officials to her left, trying to intercept her in a pincers movement. Wary of the milling crowds the approaching battalions held fire looking for a clear shot, however Fudge didn’t discriminate, and she was forced to block a further volley of spells, which were met with cries of terror from the obstructing passers-by, before she finally got sight of Rodolphus.

She had done it, she was there, only three feet away, and they were running towards the same fireplace. Rodolphus was marginally ahead of her, closer to the flames, his fingers reaching over the threshold, giving her no choice but skid the finally few paces. Careful not to lose balance, the finely tiled floor provided her with the momentum she desperately desired.

Arms outstretched, she bundled into Rodolphus, carrying the both of them into the fire just as Fudge’s men rounded on her with another array of spells.

But it didn’t matter for she was away, with Rodolphus in tow.

As they fell into the flame, she had expected him to prod her mind with a destination, for a cognitive battle of wits to occur as they grappled over the end location. To her surprise however, Rodolphus made no effort to fight.

When she thought the phrase Whitechapel Road, probing his mind in expectation of having to subdue it, the only response she had was acceptance before they both materialised on the steps outside the station. 

The first thing she heard was the mundane sounds of passing traffic, with the fog of motor exhaust diffusing through her nostrils. A retail street enveloped her surroundings from bargain basement clothes stores to perky stationary specialists. It was a ubiquitous, non-magical, muggle road. 

Meanwhile the steps below her feet led down to the Underground platforms, directing into the hustle and bustle of the city centre. Her pathway was clear, the streets seemingly dormant, withdrawn from much commerce at mid-morning on a winter weekday. 

Rather than feeling any sort of triumph from escaping the Ministry, she felt unemotional and empty, with her first reaction being to squint at the low hanging sun rupturing from the clouds. The fire travel had left her somewhat dazed and deflated to the point that in those ten seconds, she had forgotten that Rodolphus had even travelled with her.

Now, he was gone from her sight, removed as if plucked from above, without a hint or trace of his departure.

Had he even arrived at the same place? she thought.

As another car drove past, she descended the stairway, and into the station below. The stench of fast food clung to the atmosphere, whilst the air itself felt more recycled and stale, clinging to the walls. The green light of the functioning turnstiles caught her eye, as did the jolly belly laughs of the chatty ticket officer, who was mingling with a handful of commuters. Otherwise the crowds were as sparse below as they were above, a disquieting quiet had fulminated across the platforms.

She went to turn back, to wait at the top, to hope her father had made it out the Minsitry alive. It was an anxiety that competed with her utter confusion at losing Rodolphus. She had got him; she had taken him with her into the fire. For whatever reason however, he wasn’t there, not materialising on the steps. 

Only at that point did she spot the bloody hand print on the nearby door.

The otherwise alabaster white entrance to the men’s toilets was coloured by red, dripping body fluid. It could only have been him.

Taking a furtive glance over at the ticket inspector again, she washed the door with a charm, the blood easing off the surface, before entering the restroom.

Unlike the toilets at Liverpool Street, these were generously proportioned, vast and expansive in comparison to the converted closet where her brother met her demise.

They were equally non-descript however, and utterly unoccupied, except for by the sounds of Rodolphus’ laughter. Turning the corner, she saw him propped up on a row of sinks, wheezing away. His wounds, previously unseen by Aurora during their struggle were oozing blood. His dark robes, which had concealed any damage Aurora had down to him during the maze, had been cast aside against the magnolia tiles that garnished the walls. Now that he was bereft of any clothing, she could discern both the intensity of their struggle and of the Dark Mark tattoo that adorned his arm, embedded in his flesh. She could also see half of the dart, still sunken into her skin.

“It’s worn off,” he sniggered, “But I have no use of my wand anyway, I’ve done my part.”

He whistled, before reaching into the sink behind him. It was stained with his blood, which had dyed the remnants of cocaine powder under the tap left by some raving muggles, a vicious red. From it he took hold of his wand and chucked it across the room, letting it clatter on the floor, beyond his reach.

“The thing is,” he said, exposing a row of perfectly manicured teeth as he spoke, “it isn’t a question of killing me, but rather how merciful my Master will be.”

Aurora stood there, three feet away from him with her wand by her side. For whatever reason, his words seemed to penetrate through the uncertainty of her mind, cracking the clouds of confusion in her head. 

“You want to kill me. You should kill me, but you won’t.”

“Why is that?” asked Aurora, now holding her wand aloft 

“Fate always has a wicked sense of humour,” he said, as one of his cuts opened as his face stretched into a grin. Blood now dripped from the cusp of his cleft chin.

“What do you mean?” 

“You thought you were so smart, so accomplished, so ahead of the game. I have to admit you fought very bravely, which has made your actions all the more foolish.”

Aurora let him continue, she didn’t know where this was going, but a knot had formed in her stomach, almost intuitively. Rather than dismissing his ramblings through bitter sarcasm, she subconsciously leant in as he continued to speak.

“I knew you were coming. All of us knew you were coming to the Ministry today. We figured you’d have guessed it was a trap when Dolohov arrived, but we made it appear so shambolic that you might have doubted it just for a few minutes, enough for you to lose your mind. For you to chase me across the Ministry.”

Aurora tutted, “Why should I believe that?”

“Typical,” jeered Rodolphus, “I’d be in denial too if I were in your shoes. Incidentally, I’d watch out for the posters because gaining entrance illegally to the Ministry and fighting its officials is enough to send you to Azkaban.”

Aurora said nothing, it was a price to pay for revenge. 

“MacNair intentionally told your father of the maze,” Rodolphus continued. “It was all part of the plan. We knew rumour of my appearance, the man who killed your meddling, mentally addled brother, would do the trick. It would make ambushing us at our meet up point in the Ministry all but irresistible.”

Aurora tried to think of some sort of retort, but Rodolphus’ words were like dynamite to to her rationality. She tried to stay composed, but as this conversation developed, the greater sense of unease she felt. 

“We didn’t lure you to London so that we could kill you,” he then said. “We lured you to London to take you and your father away from your house.”

“Let me explain,” he announced theatrically. 

He slipped below the sink, and looked up at her whilat his naked torso continued to bleed. 

“You have been looking over your shoulder for the past few weeks haven’t you? Poor sweet girl - worrying about Dumbledore, worrying that he was following you. But the truth is we have been tracking your every step from the moment you woke up in Madam Pomfrey’s closet. Even some of the wall paintings like us, furious at how Hogwarts has gone to the dogs under that beaded fool.”

He rubbed his hands together in anticipation at what he was about to say next.

“You know Rosier was also in on the plan.”

Aurora’s raised her wand once more, a sense of defiance colouring her increasing sense of despair.

“Oh! Don’t look at me like that! Make no mistake you defeated him fair and square, and at the time we’d rather have killed you then. It would have solidified our friendship with Gorgeous George and given us a fair bit of peace. But it wasn’t the only solution, and the truth is your trip to Hogsmeade was quite a triumph for us.”

Aurora glanced around the room. It was more fitting, the sort of restroom she had imagined Rupert had died in during some sort of defiant last stand, instead of the cramped cubicle where Rodolphus his swatted his heartbeat away like a fly. Now here he was at her mercy, unashamed, wandless and yet totally at ease. She was the one at the disadvantage, as her plans and achievements were ruthlessly unravelled the longer Rodolphus spoke, and yet, she couldn’t help but continue to listen.

“Speaking of which,” he goaded, “you are probably wondering why his capture hasn’t been reported. That is because he wasn’t captured. Fudge eh? The poor, careerist Fudge? Accepting a promotion and a battalion of wizards from one of our own in the Ministry without a moment of doubt. He loved the position, feeling he deserved it to the point he failed to act with any diligence. As soon as he stormed the shack, his men turned on him. Right now he is still under the Imperius Curse, whilst Rosier and all those wizards and witches you valiantly defeated walked free from the scene. All of us were watching, to the point The Dark Lord’s attention became focused mostly upon you. Don’t flatter yourself, he takes out the weakest, isolated links in the chain, and there you were stumbling off on a revenge quest all alone.”

Was it really true? Had her shortcomings exposed the Resistance? Had she unwittingly aided the Death Eaters? Now her quest for revenge felt like both a luxury and also an unredeemable ambition. This, combined with a confirmation of her shortcomings, and the fact that with Rodolphus at her mercy she failed to finish him off, made her feel increasingly sick. 

“Lucius tracked your every step after the funeral, seeing you leave Wavelock from the back of your house,” he explained. “He joined you in Diagon Alley and tracked you from Ollivanders to the Leaky Cauldron. Then we lost sight of you for a bit. Lucius was given a last minute errand and Rowle who was supposed to take his place dropped the ball – caught up in that Vigilant protest I think. But we knew you’d go to Hogsmeade. Oh, it was simple. So simple. I took a polyjuice, getting hair off of some handsome muggle I killed on the way there. I charmed Alice Longbottom to the point of distraction, knowing she couldn’t shake me off or otherwise reveal herself as a spy. She was caught off guard in the Three Broomsticks. Oh, how noble of her for trying to look out for you. Then, I watched you take out Top Hat from the trees, I even heard Laurie arrive and take you to the church. Father Francis tipped us off about Shrieking Shack. We were laying the groundwork, looking for where just where your weaknesses lay.”

He cracked his knuckles, the blood meanwhile had begun to dry on his skin, decorating him with clotted trickles, like some sort of experimental sculpture.

“You were impressive,” he teased, with a wink “Very impressive. Rosier was furious with pain you put in him. As I said, you have your talents, but you made your crucial mistake.”

At this point, Aurora took a step back, her wand wavering in her grip, she was unsure whether she wanted to hear anymore yet she felt compelled to. Rodolphus spoke now with a triumphalist tone. 

“It was Avery. When you went to the chemist. That was what did it. It wasn’t the duels, the fights, or the pursuit, but a simple failure to think.”

“What?” said Aurora, aghast. 

“Avery, you see, he wasn’t merely a parlaying profiteer. He is one of us. He sold goods and services to corrupt officials, but the money went to us, and he fights with us. Our man in Hogsmeade.”

Rodolphus craned his neck back, amplifying his draining laugh on the concave underside of the sink so that it echoed across the room.

“Oh,” he said, “your father worked so hard to protect your household from our friends. I am afraid it appears to have all been in vain. A lot of the magic, ancient and knotted, that protects your house is hard to dispel, but provided we know where it is, enough wizards could mange it. Only one charm stood in our way. Yet, even the Fidelius Charm always has its shortcomings.”

After a pause, he said, “One of which is that if you want to keep Death Eaters out of your house, don’t write your address on a form.”

Aurora fell to her knees, suddenly breath was hard to come by, she was choking, desperate for air.

“All we needed to do,” sneered Rodolphus, “was take you from your house, under the prospect of revenge. I knew killing your brother was such a good choice. I don’t regret killing that bitch sister of Laurie’s either by the way. It’s what I do! But this isn’t what you are supposed to do! You have left your house exposed for us to attack, and now you will go back there, willingly to meet your death as you fail to save your mother!”

She had done it, it was her fault and as Rodolphus spoke she knew that everything he was saying had made sense. All this time, she had been a step behind. All this time she had thought herself so clever, so gifted, and now through her complacency, she had given away her family’s safety for the sake of a phial of veritaserum. The guilt was yet to come, only the shock was present, isolated but consequently vicious in its concentration. 

Tears streamed down her eyes as Rodolphus rose to his feet with a skip. Swiftly putting on his blooded clothes, he looked down at her with what seemed to be almost pity.

Aurora bowed her head, not feeling even the motivation to move. She had let everyone down. Now her mother, mentally fragile and physically frail, was at mercy of the Death Eaters. They would have been waiting for the chance to take down such august, influential blood-traitors, with ties to the highest ranks of the Ministry and Albus Dumbledore. Now they had their chance.

Rodolphus picked up his wand. 

To her surprise, he made no effort to attack her depleted body, instead he leant in and whispered into her ear.

“They’re waiting for you at Nelson Hall. You have about, fifteen minutes before we kill your mother. And about twenty before you fail to save her. Then we kill your father before, slowly, we kill you.”

At that moment, the door gently swung inward, emitting a teasing groan.

“Rory?” 

It was her father’s voice, it’s tone querying as he poked his head over the threshold.

He went for his wand.

“Expelliarmus,” Aurora heard him cry.

Rodolphus made no effort to resist. Aurora saw his wand flew into Gideon’s grasp.

“Finally, sweet revenge,” Gideon said, his tone breezy and confident. It was the tone of accomplishment, filling him with a tragic sense of satisfaction that Aurora was now about to break into a thousand tiny pieces. 

“Well done Aurora,” he said, embracing her kneeling figure.

After an uneasy pause, he recognised the flow of tears streaming down Aurora’s cheek.

“Rory, what’s wrong.”

Aurora looked up at Rodolphus, ignoring her father’s embrace. She never deserved his warmth again.

Rodolphus was smiling, “Tell him, Rory.”

“Rory,” said Gideon, pleading, “Stand up so we can kill him together.”

There was a pause before Aurora uttered a screech of frustration.

Her father moved back, perturbed, as Aurora’s chest heaved, and mucus ran from her nose. 

“Dad,” she then said, trembling, “we don’t have time.”

With those final words, Rodolphus disapparated in front of Gideon’s eyes. She had failed to gain her sweet revenge. In this mad, chaotic world, where fate appeared to favour only the hateful, even the crumbs of justice blew away from her grasp. 

Gideon looked at her with incredulity, he had appeared at the rendezvous point, and after stumbling on Rodolphus and Aurora in the men’s toilets, had seen his daughter let Rodolphus escape. 

She turned to him, quivering as she did so. A profound sense of shame weighed upon her neck as she looked into the depths of his eyes.

“I fucked up. I am so sorry.”


	21. Bloodlust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora rushes home to Nelson Hall, to discover that it may already be too late...

“Dad I am sorry; so sorry. I never realised I…”

“There’s no time for that now, we have to keep moving!”

He brushed off her apologies with a dismissive flick of the wrist, conjuring a false sense of flippancy that betrayed the gravity of their situation. 

It also defied the tells laid bare in the contours of his face. Beneath the increasingly sweaty fray of grey hair gathered across his forehead was a steely expression of determination. She knew that it would have been difficult for him to put her isolating failure to the back of his mind, but here he was, marching on to the difficulty ahead, with an almost palpable sense of relish. 

They were almost there, approaching the gates, gathering pace up the steep stone climb into the cemetery. 

As if history rhymed, nearly three weeks to the day that Aurora had witnessed her brother condemned to the ground, she was returning perhaps for only one more fleeting visit before her own body was confined to a maudlin six-foot tomb. It had been her mistake after all, and no matter what her father said to console her, she had failed the sibling she had so desperately sought to avenge, jeopardising the emotive remnants of her family in the process. 

She couldn’t think, she couldn’t even try to think. 

Instead all that penetrated the swirling echoes of shock were the crudest of neurological instructions, such as to follow her father’s footsteps into the cemetery. It was the only notion of cognitive activity that could break through the guilt otherwise overpowering her conscience. 

Wavelock was far below in the bowl of the valley, innocently blissful on this mid-morning winter, seemingly dormant under a blanket of white cloud. Instead, they were considerably closer to their own house, Nelson Hall, which would be footsteps away from view. 

They didn’t have much time. 

Her father had, without word, taken Aurora under his arm and had apparated from the station to the throat of a winding pebbledash path. From there, she had blindly followed him to the cemetery gates. Now such mental processes were somewhat beyond her, yet she had previously been told of its magical characteristics. 

The wizarding graves that adorned the sombre hillock had enabled it the privilege of protection from apparition or portkeys. The funeral-goers had arrived below in Wavelock when paying respects to her brother. 

Why, however, they were going to cemetery was beyond her understanding: with or without the emotional trauma. 

They passed through the gates with Gideon still leading the way, her face looking only at the ground and at her scuffled footsteps. As the iron doors squealed shut behind her, their movements were interrupted by exclamations of relief.

“Gideon?!”

Aurora made no effort to turn in direction of the noise, but she felt her father grind to a halt beside her.

Despite the coarse inhalations of breath which tinged every exclaimed syllable, the approaching voice had been formerly acquainted to her ears. 

Aurora knew it was Mrs Wharton, panting and wheezing towards them, with her typically clumsy strides. She was a woman a lot older than she looked, like much of magical kind, but with asthma and a formidable paunch. This meant that such gathered momentum from her was quite a rarity. In less urgent times, it might even have been humorous to Aurora’s black heart to imagine a wobbly geriatric struggle up a hill.

She was a squib, an accustomed member of their world with some of the magical perks of being a witch, but lacking the genetic prowess to hold a wand. She was familiar enough with the goings-on to understand that interrupting a clearly pre-occupied Gideon in such a heightened state of alarm was not something to be done lightly. Yet, Aurora’s father had always trusted her, as one of the few nearby magical tenets, to the point they had always had something of an accord.

“What is it Polly?” he said, unnervingly calm.

“Gideon, I had to tell you…my goodness … look, look at the state of you…”

Aurora sagged to one side as Mrs Wharton seemingly collapsed into Gideon’s shoulder. After a few moments however, she regained her breath.

“At least you are safe, thank heavens. I thought you were dead. I have been all over Wavelock trying to find you. Of course I hoped and prayed you were still at the Ministry. I didn’t check your house, for the love of mercy, I begged that you weren’t there.”

Though her respiratory functions had returned, she still spoke with an enveloping sense of panic and delirium. Her weight was still pressed into Gideon’s shoulder, to the point Aurora’s foot had sunk into the earth, buried in the grass above a tombstone. Yet she didn’t care for that now, instead, for the first time since Rodolphus’ revelations, her mind was fully focused on the here and now. What Mrs Wharton, the odd fish and knitting aficionado, was saying was pressing down on Aurora’s conscience like a lead weight

She thought that her guilt couldn’t permeate across a deeper level of her being than it already had, and yet through the incoherence of Mrs Warton’s ramblings, she could decipher enough. Something was wrong at the house. Where her mother was resting. 

Part of her had been pleading with the fates that Rodolphus was planting a bluff. He was not. 

“Speak properly, my dear Polly,” said Gideon, his voice becoming more heated, “What’s wrong at my house?”

“You don’t know?” she said, aghast, “Oh Gideon, just look!”

At this point Aurora felt her father’s shoulder flex as he craned his neck north-west in the direction of the heightened marshland that surrounded their home. Aurora did likewise, pulling her eyes away from the moral ease of the blades of grass below her feet. 

She didn’t know how it could have formed in the sky.

She didn’t really need to.

Its meaning was clear to see.

Nelson Hall, tucked away from muggle view by the rolling hills and obscured by magical means from any passing wizarding mourner - now stood ominously in the distance. Its elegant features had been coarsened by the remorselessly dark clouds directly above the rooftops. Etched into uncompromisingly black vapours, in a ghostly white, was the outline of a skull. It was craggy and hollow, yet sharply defined, with the barbed tongue of a serpent protruding from its jaw. 

She felt Gideon’s shoulder tense, the limbs she was leaning on for support hardened, almost in reaction to the sight in front of their eyes. 

“It can’t be,” said Gideon, aghast.

Then without a moment’s pause he turned to Mrs Wharton.

“Listen, Mrs Wharton, I don’t have time to explain, but we have known each other for years. Long enough that when I tell you to trust me, I know that you will.”

Aurora turned to Mrs Wharton for the first time, her wobbly features had tightened into a visage of concern, yet she nodded as Gideon addressed her.

“Now look, something went wrong at the Ministry” he said, before gesturing at the dark apparition in the sky.

“We both know what that symbol means” Gideon continued, “and all you can do about it from this moment on is find safety. Go home, return as quickly as you can without drawing attention to yourself. Squib registers are seldom if ever looked at. Your concern shouldn’t be the Death Eaters, they aren’t interested in you, but the Ministry might be if they see you with me. They will be after my family due to what has just happened, and we have let our guard down long enough that what you see in the sky is the consequence. Within the hour the Ministry will feel safe enough to try and arrest me, they will come to Wavelock, and they will look for anyone else they can implicate in my affairs. If anyone so much as rings your doorbell, use one of those antique portkeys I know you have hidden in your fine china drawer and get the hell out of there!”

Without response, Mrs Wharton hurried out of the cemetery, taking only one brief final glimpse at the skull on the horizon before closing the iron gates behind her with a clang.

Before Aurora could really process any of this, she felt her father’s hands upon her shoulders, his fingers pressing into the filthy rags that represented what was left of her formerly smart attire. His eyes were fixed on hers, commanding her attention as he addressed her. 

He spoke less urgently than he had done so to Mrs Wharton and with more of an emotive fingerprint to each of his syllables, but nonetheless the sincerity of what he said was largely self-evident. 

“Listen, Rory, we don’t have long. I know, even now, that you are only moments away from falling into a state of shock. Yet I must tell you, my daughter, that nothing can be more dangerous. Embracing the incapacity of grief will do nothing to save your mother, do you understand? We are in a grave situation already. I know that my words seem almost vacant to you with the guilt of your mistakes reverberating through your conscience. But we all err, we all stray into bad decisions, and nothing my dear, makes me prouder than the bravery and dedication you have shown over the past few weeks. I realise that now, you are the best thing that happened to me.” 

His words seemed to reverberate with a nagging part of her conscience, a rupture that was diluting the intensity of her grief, a trauma that had consumed her since they had left Tottenham Court Road. She couldn’t give up; she couldn’t dare to. 

Here, for the first time in years, her father was praising her with the admiration and love that she had so desperately craved, healing a wound that had been left open for far too long. 

She still couldn’t forgive herself for the mistakes she had made, the signing of that form in a moment of arrogance that had ripped through the Fidelius Charm protecting her resting mother. Yet, now her chief responsibility was responding to the adversity. 

Her father, perhaps noticing the change in her demeanour, feeling the positivity radiate through her blood, feeling her heart beat slow to a composed rhythm; gestured up at the sky.

“The skull in the sky, you have seen it on their arms haven’t you?” he said. “I have too. The Dark Mark. It’s been found in the clouds over the past few days, and the Ministry have been doing their best to hush them up. I only heard tell of the phenomenon off of Moody and after seeing a couple of photos. Mrs Wharton knows of them because a close friend of hers was killed and found in a cottage below one of these skulls down in Padstow yesterday. The Death Eaters leave it over houses they enter, where they intend to kill. If we are going to save Elizabeth we don’t have much time.”

Then as a tear ran down his face, welling into the grooves of his cheek, his voice became almost a whisper. 

“I must warn you too Rory, that we are utterly alone here. There is no back up, no saviour to rescue us. The Resistance have to keep a low-profile in order to maintain influence in the Ministry, a call to arms for full-on vigilantism will cause them to be enemies of the state, much like the Vigilant are. No, I have become a liability to Dumbledore, and it is only right for me to be the sacrificial lamb. Their forces are meagre enough as it than to risk them in a blood-bath. Not even Ariel’s Beaker can be prioritised above the survival of real opposition to the Dark Lord. As for you, the Ministry will have recognised you as you fled the atrium, right in full view of the press exiting Greyback’s trial. What I said earlier is the truth. Once they have gathered enough forces they will come to Wavelock. Maybe they will fight the Death Eaters away, but more likely they won’t. The Death Eaters will have enough contacts in high places that the Ministry will only care about arresting us. Even if I am wrong, the Ministry will be too scared or incompetent to fight them properly. What they won’t be scared of however, is taking us down. I have always been a nuisance, an inconvenience in times of trouble. I am a high figure that would make good tabloid fodder to send to Azkaban whilst you were seen fleeing a Department of significant value after breaking and entering. You can undoubtedly be linked to all the other legally murky activities you have participated in over the past few week if they add two and two together, which they will now they have every interest in doing so. You have become a problem to them, revealing the faults in their governing, and making enemies with some of the most powerful Dark Wizards in the land. Truth be told, it makes me admire you even more.”

Aurora couldn’t help it but even in these grave urgent miles, a smile radiated from her lips. 

“What it does mean however,” concluded Gideon, “is that if we survive what we are about to do, if we make it through with blood still running in our veins and breath in our lungs, we have to flee. Dumbledore, Rupert, the Beaker, these are matters that have become more and more closed, what is open to us is saving your mother and starting a new life again. If I die, Rory, or if Elizabeth dies, and just you make it out, listen to what I have said. Don’t stay here. Apparate and flee. My friends in the States would be honoured to look after you.”

He then reached into Aurora’s pocket and pulled out her wand, before handing it to her. Gesturing to the Dark Mark in the sky, he then said. “Now, are you ready, my brave, brave girl?” 

Aurora bowed her head. Here with her father behind her, with the familial bonds unified before the oncoming storm, she knew anything was possible.

“Good,” said Gideon, “as according to Rodolphus’ rambles, we only have minutes left.”

He turned to his left and strode towards a tree, ten feet away, to the east of one of the most prominent gravestones. It was a proud oak, with thick knotted roots and branches that strayed so far beyond the trunk that they drooped under their weight, giving the tree a somewhat prehensile appearance. Bare of leaves but thick of bark, Gideon bent down and tapped the base with his wand.

On impact, the ground beneath Gideon’s feet began to tremble. Dirt seemed to drain away from the earth below, and to Aurora’s eyes, it appeared the roots began to thin, until eventually they resembled cords of stretched rope. Gideon then took a few paces back, just in time to Aurora’s reckoning, as the ground completely receded around the tree. 

Somehow, inexplicably the ground surrounding the tree had hollowed, to the point that the grass below the overhanging branches had disappeared from view. In its place was a spiral staircase, made of marble, that was coiled around the trunk, which to Aurora’s surprise, was embedded twenty feet below the ground. 

It was here. This was the passage way into Nelson Hall.

In the emotional tumult of the past few minutes the question of why they were even in the cemetery had escaped from her lips. In much the same way that she wasn’t entirely sure how her father had managed to make it out of the maze. He had something, when she had been distracted by the implications of her mistake, about Kingsley and him blasting their way through the maze, and how Kingsley had pretended to be his hostage in order for to maintain his cover and to provide a Gideon a way out. 

It was at that point Gideon had arrived in Tottenham Court Road to see her failure laid bare.

They descended the staircase, wordlessly entering the depths below. 

At the foot of the stairs, they reached a tunnel, twenty feet below the ground. It was a physical channel that went as far as the eye could see until the space was enveloped by darkness. In front of them lay a rectangular plank of wood, resting on single track rail, with a chained pulley dangling above. 

Aurora made her way to the board, her father following suit. Then with a yank of the chain, it groaned into life, its concealed wheels whirling until their forward momentum drove them across the track.

Behind them the passageway re-sealed itself. She could only marvel at its simplicity. Perhaps for use in the case of a quick escape, the passageway, which was near a half-mile in length, relied on mechanical functions rather than any form of sorcery. Though hidden by magic, it was the physical escape, the built tunnel, that was seen as the best method of covertly exiting their old manor house. 

The track was so smooth that its rapid speed had no effect on their balance. They were there within a minute of entering the tunnel, coming to an abrupt halt by a host of rungs built into the wall, lit by a single torch. 

Aurora glanced up at the rungs, they led to a bronze hatch, one that looked markedly similar, nay identical, to the ones found in their cellar at home. One of a series of vaults where her father kept wine cool below the ground.

Normally this would be a time, a moment, for Aurora to remark some quip, or to bemoan her lack of observation. Now however, they were entering the breach, to whatever horrors awaited them the other side of the hatch. 

Her father turned to her and said, “This is it Rory.”

She said the only thing she could.

“I love you.”

Gideon gave her hand a firm squeeze, before saying, “Cover me.”

Holding her wand aloft, she watched her father reach towards the hatch. Gideon prised it open, teasing the hinge, trying not to make a sound. Then her father made his way up the ladder.

Following suit, she found they were in the cellar, amongst the shelves of fine wine and generous, dusty barrels of apple mead. The draft from the open slats brushed through her hair as she stretched into a standing pose. Cautiously, her father surveyed the room with his wand, looking for signs of magical interference or intrusion. 

Aurora’s mind however, was on the floors above. 

After years of excavating tombs and of raiding cursed catacombs and fighting magical beasts, this was mere second nature to her. The signs from upstairs were telling. Her trained eye could pick it all up: the jinxes and caterwauling charms that adorned the staircase up to the ground floor, and the sealing charms that were permeating from doorframes and windows, preventing anyone from leaving. 

They were here, and if Aurora was not careful, it was only a matter of time before they knew she was too. 

She turned to the staircase and whispered, “Recanteum”.

A cleansing charm, one that washed over spells like a waterfall, shone from the tip of her wand. Its silvery glow glistened over the stairs, soaking every jinx that plagued the wooden steps. 

It was another custom spell, though she didn’t claim much credit for it, as superior magic had been her inspiration. 

The goblins at Gringotts had always hoarded their knowledge jealously, but she was familiar enough with the building to know of the rumoured “Thieves Downfall”. 

This was the crushing watery cascade situated near the deepest vaults, which wiped away any concealed efforts of subterfuge. She had been fortunate enough to gain a glimpse of the magic when taken, under suspicious goblin guard, to a room of antiquities in the bowels of the bank. They had wanted her to have an image of treasures with similar characteristics to the ones they wanted from China. Aurora however, had only interest in the gushing waterfall found to one side of the track, which had the emetic effect of exposing any distrustful entrants to the bank. She had paid particular attention to it on her descent to the most secure vaults.

Combining its water charm with the “recanto” word stem, she had aped it in minor form. 

The image of water, in a shimmering glaze, washed through charms at the thresholds of cursed tombs. 

It had its drawbacks. For instance, it had no effect on harsh weather, such as the storms outside her train on that harsh October night, or the cursed fog that the werewolves had kept in jar. Furthermore, other spells such as anti-apparition jinxes were immune to its grasp. 

It did however, serve her purpose tonight.

As expected, the spell relayed its seal of success, as her wand vibrated slightly from the effort. When the charm came up against resistance too strong for its capabilities, the wand would silently sag in her fingers, as if disappointed by its efforts – almost as if the wand was somehow as knowing as Mr Ollivander often liked to claim. 

The Dark Mark would still be prominent in the sky, but the spells she had attempted to subdue, those that littered the house, would be gone, right under the Death Eaters’ noses, without even a hint of a warning. 

She would have been pleased with the success, were it not for the fact that the reminders of the study and effort she put into that spell only highlighted the contrasting foolishness of her mistakes over the past few weeks.

Her father nodded his approval as she treaded the first step, pressing her foot into the wood, testing its response to her weight, hoping to creep silently up the stairs.

Sure enough the stairs were no longer a problem and together they made their way to the top, wands raised.

Her fingers tremored as she turned the handle, exposing their bodies to the corridor beyond.

The room was as bare as before, with the candlelight reflecting off the polished oak floorboards. The winding pathway was adorned only with elaborate paintings, with all other furnishings kept to a minimum. As expected the few artefacts that found pride of place; the isolated whisky cabinet and the chintz armchair at the far end of the hall, were obscured by thick white blankets to ward off festering dust. 

Thus, the corridor was identical in character to only hours ago, yet something felt different. The sleepy, withdrawn solitude of their house, a grand manor sparsely populated by a bevy of servants, the scene only of the painful withdrawal phase of a broken marriage, had somehow been altered. 

Were it not for the Dark Mark, and the curses and charms that Aurora had disabled only moments ago, she would have no reason to suspect the Death Eaters had lingered from her first glance, but from within her very bones she could tell something was off. The hallway felt somehow eerie, her breath catching in the air, whilst the very walls appeared to almost be leaning in to the room, as if enclosing the space. 

Then, as she poked her head to her right, she caught sight of the portrait of William the Proud. The maverick wizard expeditioner, a familial ancestor whose exploits inspired the publication of the Traveller magazine, tended to take pride of place within the confines of his ostentatiously shiny frame. Yet he was nowhere to be seen, only his empty chair lay in wake across the canvas. Her father, cottoning on, tapped Aurora on her shoulder and gestured to her left. 

In all the frames, in every painting lining the corridors, the figures were gone, as if expelled from the walls.

This wasn’t Hogwarts, where figures were gifted free reign over the house. A few of the grand rooms at the front were home to individual magical portraits, but otherwise the paintings were utterly still outside of this corridor. They were only livened with spell craft along the rear hallway because it directed people to the trophy room. Aurora’s great-great grandfather had taken the opportunity to colour the pathway to their generational glories with a confirmation of the illustrious family history, but now as if reiterating her failure, every figure had gone.

Aurora was still looking for hints of their whereabouts when her father yanked her back behind the threshold. He closed the door with a subtle swish, the imprint of the soft-flamed candlelight dancing across her retinas as she was pulled into the dirge of the cellar again.

She turned to her father, bewildered, but he merely pressed a finger to his lips, as footsteps creaked across the corridor.

“Still not here,” said a gruff sounding man.

“Hmm…,” said another voice, “I thought they’d have arrived by now.” 

His voice was immediately recognisable to Aurora’s ear, it was Rosier. 

“So did I,” replied the first man, “but Dolohov got caught up at the Ministry didn’t he? “Clearly things got messy over there,” mused Rosier, “not surprised there’s been a delay.”

Rosier then paused before continuing, his coarse breath discernible from behind the door.

“Well, he will be on his way back up north now,” he said, Aurora heard the floorboards creak as he rocked back on his heels, “the same with Wilkes and Karkaroff I imagine. If there was more heat to deal with at the Ministry than we realised, then we can delay by a few minutes. We wouldn’t want to start the show without the presence of our august hosts.”

They both broke into rapturous laughter, their breath caught short by heaving guffaws. It was the satisfied sort of exultation, the sort that unnerved her for its sincere sense of victory and accomplishment. Her father twitched, irritated by their triumphalism.

When their breath returned, the first voice said to Rosier, “How do you think they’ll get here?”

“It’s an old house,” he said. “The blood-traitor father may be a fool but he isn’t without talents. Imagine there must be at least one secret passageway in. I have Murphy and her crew checking it out, they’ll be searching the cellar next.”

“Good –let’s put this to bed, once and for all.”

With that, they parted ways, their footsteps creaking through the peripheries of Aurora’s hearing. As Aurora went to turn the handle, her father caught hold of her wrist.

“Wait,” he whispered.

Sure enough, the alertness of her father paid off as fresh footsteps made their mark across the floorboards. There was more than two of them, perhaps three, possibly even four. Their measured paces came to a halt by the door, only inches from Aurora’s face which was leant in against the back of the door. 

She did her best to nullify her breath to a mere whisper of sound through her nostrils. Her father remained equally silent.

“Only room left,” grunted one of them.

“Well,” said a breezy feminine voice, “it’s always in the last place you look”.

The presumed pair behind them let out a piggish snigger. Aurora looked down, seeing shadows loom through the cracks, as one of them reached for the handle. 

“Gorgeous George will be hoping you’re right,” said the grunting man, “By the way, stick to the card draws, any treasure we find down in the cellar is Murph’s.”

“Oh what a warm gesture,” said the woman Aurora presumed was Murphy, “give me the room probably filled with cobwebs and their grandmother’s spare tombstone.”

After another bout of laughter, the handle was turned, the door swinging inward, Aurora and her father only stepping away just in time. 

There were four of them. A silver haired girl, with a powdered skin that looked to have been pampered to the point of wanton obsession. Wearing dark clothes, like her three male comrades, she carved her own semblance of identity with ostentatious jewellery that harmonised with her iridescent, swaying hair. Razor thin, though perhaps through vanity, Aurora expected her to be a former Slytherin, and she was sure she recognised the girl from her time at Hogwarts, perhaps in the year below. Two of the men meanwhile, were bearded and grisly, probably on the moon of their forties but with their mouths open to one side, and a semi-vacant gormlessness to their expression. she imagined they were very much junior partners in this situation. The fourth member was young, scarily young, to the point he looked underage, his princeling cheeks, jovial smile and seeming swagger unnerving Aurora as he stepped across the threshold. 

But they were ready, Aurora and her father had adjusted to the four intruders’ abrupt arrival. 

Gideon was crouched behind the door, whilst she was a few steps down from the silvery snatcher who was too busy marvelling the site of the gleaming wine bottles adorning the shelves below to pay attention to much else. 

The pair of them were concealed by their well-practiced disillusionment charms that they clicked into creation as soon as the door had turned. 

It was disconcerting to see such motley array violating the sanctity of their home, consisting of members ranging from spiteful to gormless to seemingly juvenile, but her father showed no mercy or pause for thought. 

“Imperio” he said.

Murphy’s eyes glazed over, and as her three friends turned on the spot, gormlessly peering out of the doorway, looking into the corridor for some sort answer, Aurora pointed her wand at their exposed backs and whispered “Stupefy” three times in quick succession, spinning the wand across her dextrous fingers as the trio fell to the floor. 

Meanwhile, her father’s coat brushed against her hand as he circled the captivated Murphy.

“Take us to Elizabeth’ he said.

Suspicion drifted across Aurora’s mind as he spoke. 

The snatchers were too simple to defeat, and now her father’s words felt like they were too easy to construe in a misleading fashion. Murphy wouldn’t be able to purposefully lead them into a trap like she would have been able to if they had coerced her through Veritaserum, yet nonetheless Gideon’s demand without caveats such as avoiding traps or Death Eaters seemed poorly thought through. Her surging adrenalin however, both nullified this worry and helped her understand exactly how her father was ticking. He didn’t care anymore, about avoiding the danger. It was anger, righteous anger, and if he had to defeat every man in Britain to secure his wife’s safety he would. 

A departure from his words of warning only minutes ago, but a satisfying bloodlust for the carnage ahead.

They proceeded, dumping the three accomplices in the cellar, with Murphy leading the way across the corridor and into the living room, which remained eerily quiet. 

The soft flicker of flames across the walls lit up the pitch colouring of the windows, the Dark Mark’s magic smothering the natural light.

Aurora and her father followed Murphy through a series of smaller rooms, in a processional line that reminded her of playing with dolls in a miniature house. She was unable however, to focus much on their detail with her pounding heartbeat, until they arrived at a closed door leading into the Great Hall. 

Murphy paused, her glazed expression persisting across her face as she gestured at the handle.

Aurora turned to Gideon, who nodded, and together the three of them entered the hall.

Rosier and his accomplice were cosily acquainted with a set of armchairs by the roaring hearth. The embrace of the flame licked their cheeks with a rosy warmth that coloured their faces. 

They had perhaps only been settled there for mere minutes, yet the slovenly nature of their behaviour betrayed their complete confidence in the situation. Like in the corridors behind her, the paintings were empty, even those of a non-magical persuasion, whilst the sweeping staircase up to the balconies above remained as fastidiously polished as ever whilst every other feature of the room was concealed behind the dust covers in the same way they had been that very morning.

Something doesn’t make sense, there is no challenge here, thought Aurora.

Before the pair of Death Eaters could even register the look of shock on their faces, Aurora pointed her wand at Rosier’s chest, aiming at the gap in his open necked robe. A target which she duly landed a bullseye on. 

He sank into the cushion of the armchair whilst Murphy, still under the effects of the curse missed a straight shot at the second figure across the fireside. To her fortune however, her spell cannoned off the mantelpiece and sored into the ceiling beams above, knocking one of the dozen or so supporting the roof from its timber structure. Within seconds it was tumbling down from high above, the cracked wood imbuing the air with the stench of sawdust as it collided with the second’s man’s armchair. 

So bewildered had he been by the turn of events, he made no effort to move as it smashed the chair in half and brought him to his knees. Aurora took one look at the dusty, wheezing figure before stunning him too, and then, on the turn, pointing at the now unfortunate Murphy. With an almost wolfish snarl she asserted her dominance over the home invaders by blasting Murphy across the room, knocking her out on impact with the far wall. 

She had served her purpose. She wasn’t much more than a common snatcher by the looks of it, but now there was no time to show much mercy and Murphy’s pitiful magical skills had been dutifully exposed by her own ingenuity. 

Aurora turned back to the two bodies on the floor, both unmoving aside from the intermittent heaving of their ribcages. It was only when studying the dust covered victim who had been beaten by a loose beam that she recognised how similar his features were to the MacNair boy she had fought in Hogsmeade. It must have been Walden, his Death Eater father. 

It had been a bad few hours for the man, having only been concussed by her father the day before. 

As Aurora surveyed the grand old room, with its great antiquities and ornate decoration, a muffled moaning sound emanated from the beams above.

She looked up.

Rotating upside down, moving in a graceful pirouette, was her mother. She was still in her silk pyjamas, snatched from her bed by the intruding Death Eaters. Her eyes were shut and her expression blank. Elizabeth’s chest was moving enough to suggest breath, but otherwise she did not stir. Instead she was utterly oblivious to the world around her.

She was suspended out of reach, yet Gideon tried what he could to bring her down. 

He tried a hovering charm, a hurling hex, and several other spells besides but they all deflected of her body. Instead, Aurora’s mother remained unaffected by the efforts, seemingly encased in magical protection they couldn’t break. 

“You didn’t honestly think it’d be that easy, did you?” said a disturbingly familiar voice from across the room.

Lucius Malfoy was standing at the top of the stairwell.

He had one arm resting on the bannister, and was dressed in his finest robes, like a prince at ease in his country abode. 

“You!” cried Aurora. 

“Me,” agreed Lucius, with a nonchalant shrug.

He then gestured to the balconies overhanging the hallway either side of him, “And them as well.”

Three figures emerged, their forms seemingly materialising out of the walls. Two of them wore dark robes that cast shadows in the candlelight as the entered the room. They strode towards the central staircase from Lucius’ right. The other from Lucius’ left, wore a well-tailored suit, yet all three concealed their faces behind silver masks. 

“Honestly,” he tutted, rolling his eyes, “You thought it’d just be MacNair and Rosier? Plus a few snatchers? Why think so little of us? We wanted to give you a proper reception. Even if you have proved to be a rather rude host so far. Don’t worry however, as no harm was done.”

He clicked his fingers, and from behind Aurora the armchairs creaked, and weight pressed down on the floorboards.

She turned around to see Rosier and MacNair standing upright, seemingly unaffected by the curses from only moments before. With an unsettling glint in his eye, Rosier turned towards Gideon and lifted up his shirt.

Shimmering before their eyes was a shirt of goblin-crafted chain mail, impervious to magic. Her stunning spells would have been merely absorbed and diluted by the magical links, leaving them invincible to her magic.

Gideon cursed under his breath and seemed to grip his wand even tighter, desperate to express his rage at the revelations but unsure how to outmatch the growing numbers before him.

Without another word, MacNair then revealed an identical defence beneath his robe to Aurora. They exchanged an unnerving chuckle before, grisly smiles etched on their faces, they brushed past Aurora and her aghast father and joined Lucius at the top of the stairs.

The satisfaction etched across Lucius’ face infuriated Aurora, she wanted to kill him, to kill all of them, to expel the rage at her very failings and the impossibility of their situation.

They had been outwitted by the most parasitic people in the Wizarding World. 

Now they were helpless. 

Now they were outnumbered. 

All she could do was join her father and mother in one last stand.

Gideon had turned away from the gloating Death Eaters above, as if allergic to their very presence. Instead his boot was prodding Murphy’s body. 

In her violent revelry, Aurora had done more damage than she had intended to her. 

Gideon bent down and pressed his ear to Murphy’s lips, picking up the faintest signs of breath.

“My dear man,” exclaimed Lucius with a tone of faux bewilderment, “Did you really think we let those sort of people in on our plans? As if I’d give fine armour to the unworthy? To those magical liabilities? She simply fulfilled her purpose of distracting you when your crazy daughter threw her against the wall!”

His sneering tone brought further laughs from his accomplices, like the sound of braying jackals circling wounded prey. The disdain they showed for the girl, a witch probably from their favoured pure-blooded stock, was callous to the point of complete confidence. They saw her as dispensable, a potential piece of collateral in a conflict they were certain in their own minds of winning.

Aurora had no love for the injured woman, though was glad enough that her spell hadn’t been so potent to end her life. It did little to extinguish the sense of rage that continued to build up in her. As they teased and provoked, and even as she knew their situation was now hopeless, she remained defiant. 

Since her father’s words in the cemetery, fear played no part in this. 

If she were to go down, she was to do so trying to save her mother, and killing as many Death Eaters as she could. 

All Aurora needed to find was the right moment to make her last stand.

Gideon’s rage was equally palpable as he turned away from Murphy and hollered at the balcony, “Still too cowardly to even take off your masks! You foul bastards, get the hell out of my house!”

“You want us to leave? Already? In time Gideon, in time,” teased Lucius. 

He let out a dramatic cough, theatrically clearing his airwaves, before brushing his extravagant gold locks away from his forehead. 

“We wouldn’t normally wish to purify this blood-traitor hovel with our noble breath,” he said, smiling across at his comrades who sniggered in responses, “but you forced our hand. Now we are all acting out of our comfort zones.”

Taking another pause, Lucius stepped onto the staircase, and descended a few steps before continuing with his performance.

“As for your request, why of course, you are right! It would be bad manners to remain concealed behind such decoration. Especially against the host’s wishes.”

An expulsion of air breezed over Aurora’s head as the ornate masks on the faces of Lucius’ friends seemed to disappear into their skin, revealing their hidden visages. 

Now standing alongside the spiky haired Rosier and the balding MacNair were three new faces. The two on the left both appeared to be on the cusp of middle age, with beards and yellowing teeth, whilst the one on the right was so manicured and well-groomed that he could only have been a big fish in a Ministry department somewhere. A bleak signpost to the nature of the Death Eaters’ infiltration. 

“May I introduce,” said Lucius, pointing to his right, “Rowle, and Travers.”

They gave mock curtseys in Gideon’s direction.

Gideon spat on the floor.

“And to my right,” purred Lucius, “Yaxley.”

A younger man with a thin face and flowing hair gave Gideon a cheery wave. He was the man wearing a well-tailored suit, giving him an almost regal suggestion of importance.

An unusual sense of warmth radiated through Aurora. They were becoming complacent, exposing their faces and revealing their names. It was of course, a display of power on their part, and a confirmation that if the Death Eaters were to have their way, this would be the final room she would ever see. 

Now though, Aurora knew that she just needed to think of an idea, or some way to utilise their carelessness. 

She was encouraged by her father, who standing next to her seemed be processing every possibility in his mind. For now, however, they merely kept their wands out and at the ready, biding their time.

Unfortunately, her sense of traction on the situation was put into question as Lucius continued speaking.

“I think,” he said, “that your daughter is already familiar with one of my colleagues here. Avery, would you like to come through? Don’t be shy company.”

From the door that led into the observatory upstairs, on Lucius’ left, emerged a man in a medicinal apron, as if he had hopped out of a shift. 

It was the man Aurora had purchased the veritaserum from in the first place, exposing their address and dooming her family as a consequence. 

“Pleasure to see you again poppet,” he grinned. 

“Bite me,” snarled Aurora. 

“Oh we know you can bark Miss Meadows,” mused Lucius, taking another few steps down the staircase.

“But I doubt you can bite,” he concluded with a wink.

He then turned to Gideon and said, “You know, Gideon, when your mad bitch screwed up and gave Avery all the details to find our way into Nelson Hall, any responsible owner would have shortened the leash.”

Lucius’ foul company barked their appreciation. They sniggered together, almost bobbing, causing their shadows to seemingly vibrate from their movement. Their wands were limp by their sides, and now they seemed nothing other than triumphant. 

Aurora steadied her gaze, doing the best to ignore the sniggers and suppress some of the bubbling rage. She looked only at Lucius, whose grin was so wide it seemed almost carved into his prominent cheekbones.

“Enough Lucius. I came here for Elizabeth, now let her go!” shouted Gideon.

Aurora turned to her father, his eyes had narrowed. 

“I can see through all of you,” he snarled, gesturing with his wand outstretched, pointing at the sneering aggressors on the balcony above. 

There were seven of them: Malfoy, Rosier, MacNair, Travers, Yaxley, Rowle, and Avery. 

Yet Gideon made no effort of restraint. 

Their words, threatening as they were, as angry as they made Aurora and her father, may have been ones of conquest, but she couldn’t help noticing how much time they had spent talking. 

The Death Eaters could have killed the pair of them, and her mother for that matter as soon as they entered the hall, but they hadn’t. 

Elizabeth was still suspended above them, her hair drooping towards the floor, her eyes still shut and her face expressionless. It was not as if she had gone to sleep, but instead as if she were somehow in stasis. Aurora meanwhile was stood exposed in a grand hall with her father, with seven Death Eaters’ standing on the balconies above.

Thus, Lucius had the three of them in as good a situation as they could have hoped, but he was delaying. His love of theatre was undeniable, but the delays came out of another characteristic: cowardice.

Part of Lucius possibly suspected that Gideon had some sort of ace up his sleeve, even though Aurora knew that he didn’t. Whilst another part of Lucius, she reasoned, probably didn’t want to fire first, hoping his friends would finish the pair of them. 

She felt he feared the consequences of losing a duel with Gideon. 

It would have been either his life or his advanced standing in Voldemort’s circle. 

Even in circumstances as dark and as bleak as this, where the world felt so remorselessly evil, her tormentors were erring. 

Lucius was trying to calculate, to somehow subdue her father with taunts until he lashed out, at which point his six cronies would resolve the matter for him. The young Malfoy was trying to be imposing, without displaying any magic. Something he was surprisingly effective at, but it gave Aurora an opportunity.

She would have to wait for the opportune moment, but with Lucius’ attention fixed on Gideon, she would have the first strike. The chance to fire a killing curse.

In circumstances as dire as this, she knew she’d mean it. 

Lucius was desperate to impose his superiority over a high-ranking former judge. She doubted he was nervous at any political implications of killing a high-profile figure, not when living through a climate of fear with a compromised Ministry and Voldemort as his safety net. He was however, yearning for something. The man wanted to impose his authority just through his footsteps, he wanted to prove his excellence. 

If she had her way, it would be his downfall. 

It would be a difficult feat, and she still had little idea how saving her mother could be achieved alongside it, but it was the crumb of a plan. Combined with her growing sense of determination, it was enough to begin sowing the seeds in her mind. 

Gideon then stepped in front of Aurora, and focused his attention specifically on Malfoy, who Aurora noticed now had his own wand ready. 

“You are just parasites,” Gideon said, slowly and dismissively, giving him a greater gravitas. “My family may live its final breathes today, yet we will never have endured the horror of the lives you live. You can cause as much terror as you want, you can harm and destroy as many families as you wish, but that will never change just how worthless you really are. Besides, you will lose. And I wouldn’t want to be in your place when the reckoning comes!”

Aurora looked to Lucius’ left. Then she looked to his right. The others weren’t laughing now, they were gazing across at each other, taciturn, somehow apprehensive. 

Any notions of uncertainty however, were placated by Lucius Malfoy. 

With a nod from Lucius, the others pulled out their wands. 

Then their figures seemingly evaporated, leaving blank wall where their dark-robed bodies had been casting shadows only moments before. Merely a second later, the seven of them re-emerged, now scattered around the room. They had taken positions. MacNair and Rosier stood alert on the left balcony, wands pointed at Aurora below by the hearth. Rowle and Travers formed on the right balcony, their wands pointed at Gideon. 

Aurora then heard a footstep crunch in the pile of firewood by the hearth. Behind her now stood Yaxley and Avery. Avery’s wand was pointed at Gideon’s back, and Aurora could see from the corner of her eye that Yaxley’s wand was aimed at hers. He had a clear shot at her from only three feet away, his breath audible in her ear. Her options were looking increasingly limited. 

She scanned their expressions. Now they suggested nothing short of ruthlessness. It was as if they had gone cold. Rather than a guise of maniacal evil, the sort she imagined they expressed when they carried out their foul deeds, they now harboured stony faces.

Above all else, Death Eaters were chosen for their skill with the wand and now the six of Lucius’ associates were primed for the abhorrent task ahead of them.

All Aurora and Gideon could do was keep their own wands pointed at Lucius, who was serenely taking his time. He made his way down the stairs, aiming his wand squarely at Gideon.

They could still kill him. 

But it would be a death wish. 

Not that it mattered, anything was a death wish now. 

Whatever the case, they still had the chance of first strike, but no situation Aurora could think of would end well for them. 

For the sake of it, she closed her eyes and tried to apparate. A smothering cognitive barrier seemed to block the magic, the air feeling somehow solid whenever she thought of a hideaway destination. They had blocked apparition, leaving only their Dark Marks working throughout the house. 

She needed a plan. 

Whatever issues she had with her hot-head and concentration, her quick wit had never failed her before. Even in times as perilous as this, she willed it to conjure some sort of silver bullet.

The crackling fire was heating the back of her head, casing her hair with sweat. Her heart seemed to almost protrude from her chest, such was the rapidity of its beat. 

Aurora looked up.

The Freudian slip, one of the few muggle theories that had posited any relevance to her thoughts had emerged once again. In a time of crisis, she had turned to her mother. 

Yet she remained as she was. Unconscious, vacant and completely within the Death Eaters’ mercy. There was no way for her to help.

Come on, please just something, she urged.

But there was no change in her mother’s behaviour. Her twirling form remained up in the rafters, oblivious to the peril below. 

Meanwhile, Lucius had stopped six feet from Gideon, and addressed him in almost a whisper, caressing the words out of his mouth, somehow imbuing them with additional viciousness. 

“Look around Gideon. Look at your house. This former beacon of grandeur was spoiled by your great-grandfather’s muddying of the bloodlines. It is the scarring embodiment of your magical pluralism. Yet its defences were swept aside by us. Look at your position. Of wealth and fame. Of pedigree and pride. Destroyed by us. The Ministry doesn’t care for you, because we ensured that through weakening their hand, they would turn away from anyone with a backbone. Oh you have admirable qualities, Gideon! But you are readable and so easy to undermine. The institution is now oh so weak, dominated by the cowardly and the reckless, neither of which can ever hope to defeat us. Your old friend Dumbledore now spends his days holed up in his office, isolated from the Minister, and you meanwhile are out of a job. Judges with your characteristics have become obsolete.”

He began to circle the pair of them, with his arms clasped behind his back, examining them like a potioneer might inspect a specimen. 

Aurora’s finger twitched. She thought to strike, only stopping at the uneasy shift in her father’s stance. It was subtle, but his shoulder dropped, as if he was communicating to bide their time.

She had little choice but to follow his lead, no magical solutions seemed on offer, her brain was no more than a leaden weight to her now.

“Worst of all,” said Lucius, “Look at your family. Your poor daughter! Posing a false stance of defiance when really she is little more than a hare lost in a foxes’ den. Look at your wife, at the mercy of your enemies. Completely within our grasp.”

He walked back to the centre of the room, and signalled beyond the stairway, notionally to the world beyond. 

“Then, look out to the hills beyond. There remains what is left of your son. Destroyed by our hand. Destroyed by the very war we instigated,” said Lucius.

“Now you are here in the hall by our design, overwhelmed by us,” he crowed.

“We are the victors Gideon,” announced Lucius, now turning back to the foot of the stairs. He dismissively gestured to the vintage décor of the room, buried by blankets of varying size before giving a dismissive tut.

“We are the future,” he declared. “A noble race of magic will be founded by the best of our generation. We will destroy all in our path.”

Aurora looked once more to her father, his wand hand had stiffened. 

He was moments away from firing a curse. 

His face was imbued with an intense focus; this was his last stand. 

His eyes were following Lucius’ every step, withdrawing his mind from any other distractions.

She knew the moment had come and now Aurora stood ready to meet her maker. 

Whatever happened next, she refused to be butchered by a horde of evil without any attempt to resist. Her brother was dead, her mother was beyond their grasp, and their efforts at revenge had failed. 

Yet there was always dignity to be gained, even in the bleakest of situations. 

Lucius turned back to her father and offered his final rebuke.

“When history speaks of you, Gideon. When they speak of your fall from grace, and from the end of your family tonight in your own home, they will say only one thing: Your day was done!”

“AVADA KEDAVRA!”

Aurora flinched, the power of the curse was undeniable. 

She had only witnessed the killing curse once in her lifetime. Aboard the train three weeks ago when one of Greyback’s gormless goons had fired at her across the carriage. Its potency however, had been greatly compromised by the limited ability of the werewolf trying to kill her. Thus she had thought nothing of it since. 

Yet as soon as the magic had been expelled from her father’s wand, the sheer speed of the curse in full flight, the way the air seemed to thin and how everything in the foreground seemed to fade into obscurity, all became apparent to Aurora.

It was a marvellous spell, a deadly one but possibly the only thing that could conquer the evil in front of her.

Instinctively, she turned her wand to the top of the staircase, looking to fire at either Travers or Rowle whilst their split second advantage remained intact.

However, it was only when pointing at their dark-robed forms that she noticed their wands now rested limply by their sides. As if they were making no effort of resistance. 

Lucius too had disarmed; he was tucking his wand into his pocket.

Only then did Aurora realise.

The voice that had shouted the killing curse: it had been female.

Panic reigned over her body, her nerves tingled, and suddenly it became too difficult to keep firm hold of her wand. 

Yet she turned to her left. 

Her father, Gideon Meadows had crumpled to the floor, dead. 

He had collapsed sideways, the sound of his body knocking against the wood obscured by fevered intensity of her mind, and her efforts to respond to what she had presumed was her father’s curse.

Immediately Aurora fell to her knees. She reached for the lapels of her father’s coat and wrenched at them until he was lying flat on his back.

Gideon’s face archived his final moments. The fierce determination that had carried him through hell contoured his expression into one of battle-hardened readiness. Sweat still dribbled down his world-weary cheeks. Her father’s eyes however, were glassy and vacant, the pupils dilated. Almost like a wax figure propped up in a heritage museum, he was unmoving and still, however real he appeared.

There was no mistaking it, he was gone.

The curse had stopped his heart, flicking the switch, taking him from the land of the living.

Shock radiated through Aurora, her ribs heaved, her breath fell short, and around her she could detect mere silence. The momentous nature of what had taken place had been lost on o no one.

In vain she pressed down on his chest, somehow hoping to revive him, stopping only when a shadow came into view, darkening the frozen face of her father.

“No, no, it can’t be no,” she murmured. 

Tears failed to come, yet only because the bleak dystopia that greeted every extra second she was alive was still weighing down on her lungs. It was difficult to breathe.

Adrenaline had failed her, as her focus had been on Lucius all that time, she hadn’t observed the change in her surroundings. The killer had entered the room minutes before, whilst she had remained oblivious all along. 

The outline was slender and graceful, though frizzy at one end, exposing a somewhat ramshackle and frizzy hairstyle through silhouette.

Aurora looked up, straining her neck to see who had done it.

She recognised the woman from wanted posters across Britain.

It was Bellatrix Lestrange.

Wearing her customary black corset and dress, she loomed over Aurora with her wand outstretched, a speckle of green still emitting from the tip. She was at least three inches taller than Aurora, with an elegance and beauty that seemed to suggest her power. The defined cheekbones and angular face hauntingly complimented Bellatrix’s black eyes, and gave a sense of sinister authority to her presence.

Almost out of resignation Aurora dropped her wand, hearing it knock against the floor. The effort of comprehending what was happening in front of her was too much for her now. The grief, the guilt, the futility, it had destroyed her. Even her last defining characteristics: rage, intelligence, and a purposeful rush had let her down.

Her knees, tucked into her crouching position, gave way and she fell flat on her back, the ceiling little more than a blur as the tears finally came. She wasn’t crying yet water built up across her eyelids, out of a deeper sense of sorrow. Streams of tears ran down Aurora’s face, now as lifeless as that of her father’s beside her.

Bellatrix, however, appeared to have been thrilled by her success as from out of the blur of her surroundings, Aurora heard her address Lucius.

“Terribly sorry to have interrupted like that,” she said with a squeak at the end, almost as if conveying a mock sense of apology. 

“But I get tired of all the posturing.”

After a momentary pause, Bellatrix began to speak again, her voice, posh and articulated was filled with a knowing sense of irony. 

“My dear cousin, you do have the greatest weakness for theatre, don’t you?” she mused, resting her arm across Lucius’ shoulder.

With that, the room erupted into cackles of glee. It was a sickening sense of accomplishment that reverberated through Aurora’s very being, her body vibrating against the floor from the noise. Some of them stamped their feet, others let of sparks from their wands which let out fizzing bangs up in the rafters. 

Aurora closed her eyes. The twins had warned her only hours before of the foolish nature of her attempts. The beaker, that prized artefact, and the intrigue of her confusing dreams meant nothing now. Nothing would help her now, instead only her heart spoke, so wrenchingly pleading in its tone.

“Dad wake up, please wake up.”

It was all she could bring herself to say. 

Her words were audible enough that they were greeted with derisive sneers. The sounds were louder than before, she could only assume they had descended the staircase, and were now all gathered near the fiery hearth.

Sharp nails dug into Aurora’s chin. 

The sensuous musk of Bellatrix’s hair and intoxicating perfume overwhelmed her senses as the dark witch leant down and surveyed its prey.

Her grip was surprisingly strong as she then took hold of Aurora’s cheeks. 

Aurora could feel blood marrying with the dampness of her tears as Bellatrix asserted her control. She pressed in until Aurora’s was compelled to open her eyes from the pain.

Only inches away, and consuming her entire field of vision, was Bellatrix’s gleeful face. 

With a grin, she said, “I hear you have been after my husband?" "Don’t worry," she continued, "it won’t be for much longer. You’ll be with your dearly departed Daddy very soon.”

Aurora, smarting from Bellatrix’s grip, did all she could to muster some sort of defiant reply, this time the best she could do was speak in dismissive honesty. 

“Then go ahead and do it, kill me, kill me now,” she spluttered.

Bellatrix leant in, even closer to her face. Aurora tried to adjust her neck but Bellatrix held firm. Now their breath appeared to almost be shared, the rhythmic and satisfied breathing of Bellatrix working in tandem with the frigid breath of her victim. Even with so little echoing in Aurora’s mind, the overpowering sense of Bellatrix’s dominance managed to register. She was Bellatrix’s now, like so many others, to be disposed of however she pleased. 

“Not yet darling, just hold on a little longer,” she whispered.

She pushed Aurora back on to the floor, and stood up once more.

Aurora heard her address the rest of her cronies.

“Besides, did I forget to mention? We are saving Miss Meadows for someone special.”

A few of the Death Eaters jeered.

Bellatrix however put on a voice of mock concern.

“Travers, Yaxley, see to it that our sweet pea is put back on her feet. I wouldn’t want her to miss the arrival.”

Aurora felt the floorboards wobble as two sets of boots approached. 

She made a feeble attempt to grasp her wand once again, reaching for it from inches away, but a firm hand caught hold of her wrist whilst another plucked the wand off the floor and out of sight.

She looked to her right to see a manicured hand tuck it into the velvet lining of a suit pocket.

Then before she could attempt any other efforts of resistance, Travers, with his beard brushing against her face, had bent down and wrapped his hand around her other wrist.

Together they lifted her into a standing position, manipulating her like a marionette.

They kept her arms within their grasp. Yaxley held one, Travers the other, propping her into a standing position as she leant into their bodies, unable to carry her weight from the shock. She couldn’t resist, even more so now that they had taken her wand. Their limbs were surprisingly muscled and held her so firm that she wouldn’t have been able to break free even if she had wanted to. 

She couldn’t bear to look at their gloating faces, or to see her mother still helpless above. So she rested her head against her chest, trying to cut herself off from the world.

Before she could drift into the abyss of lost consciousness, Bellatrix fired a spell.

Aurora’s chin, as if constructed out of a clockwork mechanism, cranked into an upright position. Her eyelids opened in a flash. The fatigue and the resignation remained but try as she could, she couldn’t shut her eyes or look away from Bellatrix’s sneering face.

Lucius’ face was contorted into a crooked smile, whilst the three next to him were grinning with malevolent satisfaction. 

She had done it, Bellatrix had. She had taken any remaining sense of Aurora’s dignity. Forcing her to watch as Bellatrix rummaged through Gideon’s coat.

“Don’t touch him!” screamed Aurora.

The words echoed across the hall, the faces of the Death Eaters remained unmoved. 

Instead Bellatrix merely continued to rummage until she found Gideon’s wand and snapped it in two.

“Your magic, the Nelson magic, is oh so weak,” she said.

Bellatrix walked back over to Aurora. She struggled but Travers and Yaxley remained too strong, whilst Bellatrix’s magic kept her face in place as if held in a magical vice. 

Bellatrix made a cooing sound like a songbird.

She then said, “Come on love, you wouldn’t want to be to rude. You need to meet your final guest. And I must say, we had to work to get him here. I am afraid your friends did their best to send him off to Azkaban, to send the dog to kennels, but we ensured he could come to the party. Not even a mere sentencing trial was going to stop him from finding his way back to you.”

She beckoned to the door behind her. One that led into the eastern wing, where the kitchens were. 

“Oh Fenrir?”

The door crashed open, breaking off its hinges.

A werewolf had entered the room.


	22. Savagery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the arrival of Bellatrix and Greyback, all seems lost for Aurora...

His eyes were the first thing she recognised.

Yellow and set behind the cavernous ridges of his brow, they possessed an intensity alien to mere humans. It was a stare that bore into Aurora’s soul and made every fibre of her being tremor in fear.

He was wearing the same attire as that night on the train. A jacket that barely fitted across his hardened chest, failing to conceal the scars and tufts of fur. What was different however, was the blood dripping from his fangs, and the smears of red across his trousers. 

Aurora looked down at his hands. 

Torn from the throat, like uprooted trees, with bones protruding from flesh, were the faces of Roma and Mardy, two of the serving house elves. Two creatures that served her family so nobly for decades, now reduced to carcasses for a bloodthirsty beast. 

In the furore she had forgotten about them and now their heads portrayed the cost of her complacency, clasped in Greyback’s claws.

“Sorry about the mess, petal,” he teased.

After letting out a growl, he threw the pair of heads onto the landing, twenty feet above. Their skulls bounced across the floor.

“Bloody little gnomes,” said Greyback as Mardy’s face collided with an antique globe which fell to the floor and shattered.

Bellatrix then stood between Greyback and Aurora and said, “Well, I think last time the two of you got off on the wrong foot. But I am sure the pair of you can make amends.”

“More than happy to oblige,” replied Greyback, readying his claws. 

“Let’s deal with the old lady first, shall we?” interjected Lucius.

“Good point cousin,” said Bellatrix.

Greyback looked unconvinced, but Bellatrix responded by mouthing the word “later”, somehow managing to still convey a dark authority that not even the werewolf wanted to challenge. 

Aurora looked up for the second time, willing her helpless mother to do something. Her body continued to gently rotate above them, out of physical reach and yet utterly susceptible to Bellatrix’s wand.

“Renervate,” said Bellatrix, pointing at Elizabeth. 

With a flicker, the eyes of Aurora’s mother opened, waking her into a nightmare.

The next few minutes were painful for Aurora.

Bellatrix had developed a reputation for playing with her food, something that Aurora had heard murmurs of since she had returned to England. Voldemort trusted her, gave her powers and position that defied her young age. Her authority was unquestionable, her bloodlust seemingly untameable.

Aurora struggled, hoping to somehow challenge the witch in front of her, but the grip of Travers and Yaxley was remorselessly strong.

Thus she was compelled to watch as her mother’s screams filled the hall. 

The reversal of natural balance, as her mother cried out for mercy whilst her child was compelled to look, had no effect on the Death Eaters who only grinned in appreciation of Bellatrix’s savagery. 

The unalienable link between a mother and child, as the dead father lay on the floor, was being abused at Bellatrix’s hand. The pain of Elizabeth, as she screamed wordless cries reverberated through Aurora’s core, tearing through her soul.

“Crucio,” cried Bellatrix again and again, firing the vicious spells into Elizabeth’s abdomen. 

She was helpless, as powerless as Aurora who writhed for all her might to break free, but still to no avail. Elizabeth continued to dangle upside down, still turning ever so gracefully even as curse after curse lay on her body.

Instead the pain was expressed on her face. Elizabeth’s normally vacant, semi-confused expression contoured into one of sharp pain. She couldn’t move her limbs, but her face conveyed her torment more than anything else possibly could. Aurora had hoped that perhaps her mother’s drift to insanity may have somehow relieved or rebounded the worst of Bellatrix’s magic, yet the brutality of her craft pierced through the confused nature of her mother’s mind. 

It lasted for minutes, before Bellatrix flicked her wrist. Elizabeth’s beaten body was then flung from side to side, from the floor to the rafters, whilst the Death Eaters surrounding her jeered. 

Aurora could take no more.

“Please,” she screamed, “Stop it! Stop it! Anything I beg you! Let her go!”

Lucius could only respond with a sneer, whilst Rowle gave her a sharp punch to the gut for her troubles.

Bellatrix, however, turned back to Aurora with a wicked grin.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, she said, “Very well”.

As gently as she could, she dropped Elizabeth to the ground, hovering her slightly above the floor before letting her limbs knock the floorboards. 

Her mother lay panting, seemingly oblivious to Aurora’s presence, only aware of the pain that coursed through her addled mind and distorted reality, her hair swept across her face. There were no surface wounds, no suggestion of the torment, other than her reaction to what had transpired.

Elizabeth wasn’t dead yet, but Aurora knew she was finished. Whatever had been left of her mother was gone.

Futilely Aurora glanced down at her father, willing him to somehow wake up, but he was dead, his body motionless, gone from her forever. 

“Is that the best you can do?” snarled Bellatrix approaching Aurora once more. “Cry and cry and wish for me to stop? You scourged the Nelson name, bastardised the blood. Friends of old precious saint Dumbledore. But where is he? Where is he now?”

Aurora said nothing, there was nothing to say.

“No one cares, about you, about your blood-traitor ways, you’re nothing,” she said, spitting a ball of phlegm which dribbled down Aurora’s forehead. 

“But you know what? Fine, if you would like to die first. Then so be it. Greyback, she’s yours…”

With that, Bellatrix took hold of Aurora by the collar and dragged her across the room. 

“Everyone form a ring,” announced Lucius.

Leaving Elizabeth’s heaving husk of a body propped up on an armchair by the fire, opposite the crippled Murphy and a mere two feet from Gideon’s corpse, the nine Death Eaters encircled the weakened Aurora. 

She looked to her left, seeing Rowle, Yaxley, and Travers blocking her way. To her right stood Lucius, Bellatrix, and Rosier whilst MacNair stood behind her, and Avery in front, obstructing her view of the hearth. 

Wandless, bruised, emotionally compromised; she was in no fit state to fight a werewolf. Greyback however, had no interest in fairness as he was allowed into circle, whilst Bellatrix let go of Aurora and retreated, taking her spot next to Lucius.

He stripped his grizzled body bare whilst his claws, sharp and curved, glinted off of the candlelight. His teeth, still red from the blood of the house-elves necks, were embedded below his lip, as if clenching, struggling to retain even a modicum of restraint from his overwhelming desire for blood. 

She wouldn’t fight him this time. 

Her death would be painful, horrid, and by no means pretty, but this was it. The end.

“You know darling,” he growled, sniffing the air, “when we met last time I knew it would not be our last. Somewhere deep down I knew my final moment with you would be uniquely special. I look forward to breaking you, every bone, to sip the marrow of life from you, before I savour your blood.”

Aurora didn’t respond.

Greyback stepped a few feet forward, coming closer and closer to her until his face was impossible to hide from her vision. 

She closed her eyes. 

In her head, she thought of a photograph in her room, one of her family. 

The photograph depicted them sitting together in a meadow, with Rupert still a baby on the cusp of speech, and with her still an infant dressed in a yellow hairband. Sure it was an idealistic image, a betrayal of reality, particularly when her father had since told her that his smile in the picture was a grimace from an incoming bee, or that the picnic they had was undercooked, or that her mother’s tea flask contained a pint of whisky. Yet that didn’t matter, they were a family, they loved each other, and it was only thing that could give her strength before Greyback stripped her of everything that defined her.

The circle seemed to almost inhale, anticipating Greyback’s next steps. 

Aurora felt his claws brush against her neck.

She shivered, bracing herself for the inevitable.

Then the ceiling fell in.

The shock registered before any sound. The floor vibrated, before seemingly cracking from an intense build up in pressure. 

Before Greyback could lay another finger on her, a thunderous beam of wood crashed into the floorboards, breaking the ground below its weight. Such was its impact that the ceiling tiles came with it, shattering and coming one with the growing mound of rubble and earth. It had split the room in two, whilst a succession of fractures had brought the surrounding smaller structures of wood into play, colliding with the Death Eaters in the circle. 

The rupture in the floor created a chute to the basement below, the momentum toppling Greyback, who despite battling vainly, fell through to the floors below, the look of surprise almost comical to Aurora as he slid underneath. 

Meanwhile, a falling beam had caught Yaxley on the shoulder, winding him before falling brickwork knocked him out cold. 

The remains of the circling pack looked at Aurora with profound suspicion, with the exceptions of Lucius who was searching the now exposed sky for an explanation, and Bellatrix, who understood exactly what happened.

“You bitch!” she screamed, pointing towards the hearth.

Elizabeth, Aurora’s mother, was standing up by the fireplace.

Defiant, unbowed, unbroken she had risen from her stupor in Aurora’s hour of need. 

Almost instinctively like the magic of a child, she had brought the roof down, doing whatever she could to protect her daughter.

Her arms were outstretched, reaching towards the blackened sky. 

Before anyone could respond, she lowered her arms in a hailing motion. 

With that gesture, every remaining beam, every wooden timber of support, from the walls, to the floor to the roof snapped in two. 

The walls sagged, the wax candles toppled from their fixtures, and thick clouds of dust rained down from above, caking their dark attire in thick plumes of grey. Yet this was only a suggestion of what was next to occur, as the room caved in.

It wasn’t clear what exactly happened, but as the first beams snapped Aurora instinctively ducked down, conjuring a shield charm.

Without her wand, and requiring such rash improvisation, Aurora hadn’t succeeded in her chief intention of extending the deflecting spell across to the armchairs, out of an instinct to protect her mother. The magical web only extended a few feet from her shoes doing enough to protect her but offer little else to minimise the ruins of her former home. 

Instead she climbed free of a pile of rubble and soot, and looked up at the enchanted pitch black sky. 

It framed the scene, its dark embrace consuming the world around her, with only her wand providing any flicker of light. 

“Boreos,” she said at once, with a customary click.

She now scanned the scene, the traces and outlines of the carnage coming familiar to her vision. 

The room had been split in two, a mound of perhaps twenty feet had formed diagonally across the room, blocking the way to the stairwell. It consisted of wood, glass, earth and brick, and had filled the room with a dense layer of dust that caused Aurora to slow down her breathing pattern, in an effort to defy the coarse nature of the ruins. 

It even filled the cavernous hole to the basement, such was the size of the mound. On the floor lay the concussed bodies of Lucius Malfoy, seemingly beaten by a wooden beam, and the bodies of Rowle and MacNair, both knocked cold by stray bricks from the walls. What took hold of her attention however, was Yaxley’s body, protruding from the mound of rubble in the centre of the room. 

Her wand was sticking out of his chest pocket, a few inches below the running stream of blood seeping from his mouth. She pulled it free before turning around, looking for both her mother and a way out. 

The balconies had crumbled, slipping from the walls which were cracked and leaning inwards. Her shoes were caked in dust and dirt, the floor broken exposing the foundations below her feet. 

Behind her, where the hearth had proudly stood, was now only a pile of rubble, of brick, wood and stone, that mirrored the central heap which engulfed the hall. Her father’s body was nowhere to be seen, probably buried deep below, alongside that of Murphy who would have certainly perished now. Try as she might, no other Death Eaters could be seen, no figures were lurking by the dust stained walls. A doorway, still standing exposed her route of escape, whilst to her right her Elizabeth called her name.

“Rory,” she said, her voice hoarse from the dust and earth.

Immediately Aurora turned on the spot, to see her mother lying below a heap of wood and crumbling stone below what used to be one of the hall’s balconies.

Her lower half was obscured by the pile, whilst her chest protruded from the dirt, one hand free of the collapsing building material. 

Aurora scanned the rubble, and even with her skill it was too great for her to lift away, such was its weight. Like all grand wizarding houses, the materials were charmed to immunity from most efforts of destruction, a fact that only exposed the formidable power of her mother’s magic. 

“My love,” said Elizabeth, stroking her cheek, the warmth of her blood reminding Aurora of the mother she always knew.

“Mum,” said Aurora, reaching out and taking hold of her hand. 

For that moment, with Elizabeth’s hand across her face and her own hands in contact with with her mother’s flesh, she was at one with the world. A spare moment of tranquillity and peace in the chaos consuming their lives.

Eventually however, the moment would have to pass.

“Go,” croaked Elizabeth, “get out of here why you still can. Run!”

Aurora was hesitant, desperate to somehow maintain this embrace. Deep down she knew it to be their final one.

Only Bellatrix’s voice could snatch her away from this infinity of peace.

“Come on, clear the rubble! I will skin that harlot with my bare hands if I have to!” she shrieked. 

Her orders were followed by the firing of futile spells from the Death Eaters and her curses of frustration.

Her mother stared deep into Aurora’s eyes.

In this moment of clarity, Aurora knew she understood her fear, and could give her the words she needed to hear. 

“I will do what I can to hold them back, but you have to get away. Please. I love you, I will always love you. Now go! Live! Live for me!”

With a lump in her throat Aurora turned away from her mother and looked to her left. The lower half of a doorway, one into the wobbling remnants of the drawing room, was visible to her sight. 

She feared the Death Eaters would materialise, and escape from the collapsing ruin of her home by apparating only metres from her face. 

Yet as she moved towards the door, her mother’s spell craft worked to its soaring potential once again, as objects from the rooms surrounding the hall flew through the cracks. Like a swirling vortex, they whirled through the air, producing thick gusts of wind that surely knocked the battling Death Eaters off their stride.

“Reducto! Reducto! Reducto!” was all Aurora could hear from the struggling Death Eaters as she entered the drawing room.

Like the hall, the room was severely damaged, the ceiling having caved in here as well, the table split in half by the force of the collapsed timber. Yet the pathway to the outside world was clear, and she moved through with a purpose all the way to the conservatory, before the building began to sway.

As if it was her mother’s last act of defiance, the entire house was shaking, the bricks cracking, the windows shattering, the ceilings above crumbling. 

Throwing caution to the wind, she leapt out the conservatory window, through a bushel of pot plants, and into the earthy banks of a flowerbed, just as a crash of titanic proportions overwhelmed her senses, rapturing her ears with a sound of remorseless ferocity.

She turned back and through her night vision, she saw the west wing of the manor had been reduced to a mound.

What she didn’t expect was for it to be turned to cinders, as Bellatrix’s voice permeated the air.

“I will get that foul quim if it is the last thing I do! Fiendyfyre!”

With that, the house went up in flames, the remnants of the roof turned to kindling, as the remaining windows magnified the rapturous colour of the red flame that soared through the house.

Aurora no longer had the time for hesitation, with an increased sense of vigour she got up and ran.

Their garden was big, possibly seven acres, though most of it lay across the other side of her house.

In front of her stood only a series of flowerbeds, an assortment of sheds, an ornate arboretum, and an orchard that led onto a gate out into the open hills, away from the darkness and into the safety of the world. 

Part of her had hoped for some intervention from the beaker, from the figures who had warned her of today’s attempt (and been proven so utterly right) or the phantom figures that traumatised her sleep. Yet it was real blood, that of her mother’s, which had saved her today.

She made it through the manicured gardens with ease, preying that no Death Eater would materialise in front of her. 

They had no idea where she had run, and even if they had escaped through the flames, there were only four of them conscious now: Bellatrix, Avery, Rosier and Travers. That was assuming they hadn’t been knocked out like the other five, when really she had only heard Bellatrix’s voice. 

Any reassurance she had from those thoughts was interrupted as she same to the picket fence surrounding the apple trees, the trickling of the water features just audible over the bombast behind her, and the smell of honey in the bee huts to the east teasing her nose. 

She then tumbled over the fence, landing in the orchard. 

A gate at the far end lay open, to the hills above, to the world beyond the boundaries of her house where she could safely apparate away. 

There was a dirt path in front of her, which was was an uncomplicated straight line. It passed the fountain halfway along the orchard, and through the gate out of the plot. Conveniently it didn’t lead to surrounding marshes like the entryways at the front of the house, but instead led to a few isolated hills, and a long path back to the graveyard she had come from not so long ago.

After a few steps however, the glint of Bellatrix’s black eyes caught Aurora’s attention. 

She had been fast. 

Within seconds of her fiery curse, she must have touched her arm and travelled to the centre of the orchard, guessing Aurora’s route to freedom. 

Now, Bellatrix was keenly waiting for Aurora, with apple trees lining both sides of the pathway. 

She was resting against a stone fountain, where the water flowed from various chutes. Her wand was grasped in one hand, and in the other she was clasping a wounded Elizabeth by the fringes of her hair. Her severely wounded body was propped up by Bellatrix’s firm grip, her legs unmoving behind her to the point they suggested complete immobility. 

Bellatrix dragged Elizabeth towards Aurora, licking her lips as she did so.

Ten or so feet from Aurora’s shoes, she let go of Elizabeth, who sagged to her knees.

“It was a brave effort, but it has to end somewhere,” she purred.

Then with her left hand now free she pulled a meat cleaver out from the back of her corset.

Looking at the blade with some affection, she said, “Do you really want to see your dear mother die this way? Drop your wand and surrender, and I will give you both a clean death. A painless one even.”

She gestured to her wand now, as if suggesting that the choice was between that or the butcher’s blade. 

Aurora took a step towards Bellatrix, thinking through her options, looking to assess her next move. 

Meanwhile, Elizabeth looked up at her once again, yet she no longer possessed the sense of identity that coloured their final meeting. The drops of sanity that valiantly served her moments before had succumbed once again to the confusions of her mind. She didn’t even recognise Aurora. 

All Elizabeth could do was let out a loud groan of pain.

“Silence,” hissed Bellatrix, thumping Elizabeth across the back of the head, knocking her out cold. 

She crumpled, falling back to the dirt in a heap.

“Now,” said Bellatrix, “throw your wand towards me.”

“I don’t think that sounds like a good idea, do you?” said a voice from behind Bellatrix.

A shining dome had appeared on the hill above the orchard, a shield charm of surprising clarity and power. From within its confines stood Laurie, looking down on the three of them. 

He was clothed in a long winter coat, and his striking figure portrayed a sense of authority that Aurora had never seen from him before. His wand was lit, a white flame teased from the tip, and he was armed with an expression of righteous anger.

She had no idea how he had escaped, or why he was helping her after she had rejected him only hours before. Yet his appearance was so welcomingly timely, she had no choice but to smile.

“What?” screamed Bellatrix, bewildered by the development.

Without another word, white light fizzed out of Laurie’s wand, a forked charge of magic that Bellatrix deflected into the sky, rocketing the spell into the darkness above. 

He had performed a crucial piece of magic, keeping his body shielded from Bellatrix and yet the charmed dome allowed his magic to escape the enclosure, it was of a power that Aurora had never witnessed from him, charm work she had only ever seen Flitwick accomplish.

He fired again, this time missing Bellatrix by a few millimetres. Instead she reappeared only feet away from Laurie, her wand out at the ready. Aurora however, had anticipated the trick and before Bellatrix could aim a curse.

Aurora expelled a blast of air from her wand, a ball energy that tumbled across the orchard, forcing Bellatrix to sidestep. 

Laurie then shot another spell, hoping to take advantage of Bellatrix’s momentary loss of footing but once again her magic was formidable and she swiped the spell away with ease.

Aurora however, had no intention of giving up and instead of conventional spell craft, she aimed at the fountain and shot a blasting curse. The water fountain exploded, the stonework hailing across the orchard, water shooting upward in an irrepressible wave, almost like gunfire from a turret. 

It was enough to distract Bellatrix, who was bowled over by the force of the water. Aurora took advantage of this moment of grace, and aimed at a dangling reed from a birch tree above the orchard, standing a few feet from Laurie. She pulled the vine towards her. Like a winding cord, it followed her wrist before, with a wave of her wand, it wrapped around her mother’s ankle. Then primed like a lasso, attached as it was to the branch, she propelled her mother’s body out of the orchard, reeled in by the tree reeds. She was left dangling only feet away from Laurie.

Thankfully he had cottoned onto her trick in the nick of time, and he cut Elizabeth down with a cry of “Diffindo!”. 

He then applied a hovering charm and gently pulled her away from the fray of battle, resting her over his shoulder.

Bellatrix however, was rising to her feet once again.

Laurie’s eyes made contact with Aurora’s.

“This way Rory,” he shouted, “I can hold her off but you’ve…”

Aurora couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence as Bellatrix had already fired a curse in her direction, she deflected it with a shield charm before gathering pace, running to the open gate beyond the fountain.

She kept her wand aloft over her shoulder forced as she was to block curse after curse, Laurie providing her ample cover from above, keeping Bellatrix occupied with his spells as much as he could. Without his intervention, she’d be dead, such was the ferocity of Bellatrix’s spell craft as she pursued her across the orchard. 

Blissfully however, Aurora made it through the gate, and into the protection of Laurie’s shield charm. Bellatrix let out a scream of frustration, a sole figure of fury left within the orchard.

She wasn’t to be alone for long however, as in the distance they could see three figures emerge from the fiery husk of Nelson Hall, their silhouettes defined by the ash and smoke. 

They had left wreckage, clad in black, their masks back on their face once more. 

It would be mere minutes before they reached the orchard. 

“They’re coming now,” explained Aurora.

Laurie’s response was calm, “I suggest we leave.” 

Then, just like last time in a moment of crises he pulled out an enchanted piece of kitchen ware from his bag. This time it was a cup, with an obvious magical sheen. 

It was a portkey.

“I still don’t trust apparition, we’re pretty close the Dark Mark still,” he explained.

“Hold on,” he then said.

Aurora took one last look at the flaming remnants of her house, the fallen bastion of her childhood memories, before reaching towards the cup. She held on as the portkey began its nauseous ritual, turning her world upside down as it yanked backwards through a swirling vortex of righteous colour. Despite the uncomfortable sensation she held on, gripping the device firmly until it spat her across the ground. 

Her cheeks sank into the deep, mulchy underbelly of the marsh, which greeted her arrival with a turbid embrace. 

With a click of her fingers, she subdued her night vision.

After a groan, she stood up and, lifting her feet out of the mud, Aurora surveyed her surroundings.

She had been her before, it was Scotland.

Laurie had lived to the northeast, in a land of mist and reeds, a swampy landscape that defied the rolling hillocks and hard stone that characterised the Highlands. 

There were no muggles to be found, their surroundings were as remote as anything Aurora could ever anticipate.

The cloudy sky typified the barren beauty of the land consuming her every step, whilst also reminding her it was still only before noon. Just because her house had been shadowed in darkness, it did not mean night had fallen.

Few trees could be seen, only a proud battling few emerged from the marsh, leaning at awkward angles, with broken trunks and snapped branches. 

Instead as Aurora had remembered on the two times she had visited, a castle, of silvery stone rested on a plateau of rock, an isolated island in the slop that watered it. 

It was as proud and as elegant as she remembered, nowhere near as sizeable as Hogwarts, but seemingly sculpted with proud towers and dreaming spires, thus possessing a beauty that surpassed Hogwarts and defied the wild climate.

Even in this low moment, she was reminded of what magic could do.

Though as she though that, part of her remembered it was a morgue to the man who had just saved her, the place where his sister Lola had died, who she had failed to avenge.

The building was perhaps a half-mile in the distance, a good twenty-minute trudge from her shoes.

Laurie meanwhile, was standing perhaps twenty feet away, his coated figure discernible to her west. He had landed more gracefully. 

Clearly his intervention had been prepared, for on a dry spit of earth, he had set up a solitary tent with a fire, and was now warming his hands by it.

Butterflies continued to flutter through her stomach, her bones shaking somewhat from the effect. She had betrayed Laurie and here he was helping her.

Somehow he had woken up from the stupor, garnered clothes, adapted his plan, and arrived just in the nick of time to save her.

It was even a mystery why she saved her when Rodolphus had already cut himself loose, offering him no purpose of revenge. For that matter it made no sense how he knew what happened to her, and how she would be at the manor.

Yet now was not the time for such questions, all she could do was offer the most contrition she could, and find a way to make amends before going on her way.

Thus Aurora stumbled through the grime to Laurie’s tent, not knowing what to say or think.

“Here,” said Laurie, as she arrived, offering her a cloth to wipe the mud from her face.

“Thanks,” said Aurora quickly, wiping the dirt away.

“Listen,” she then said, surveying the camp, looking at the bundles of cloth and rope which were piled by the fire and the sloppy red dye of the tent, “I know what I did was stupid but it was a really diffi-”

She stopped in her tracks. 

Aurora looked at Laurie, in his winter attire, and at the ground below his feet.

“Wait a moment,” said Aurora, panicking, “My mother, where’s my mother?”

“Back at Nelson Hall,” said Laurie, shrugging, “When I took hold of the portkey I let go of dear Elizabeth.”

“But, I…what?” exclaimed Aurora, bewildered.

It couldn’t be. 

Laurie would never have been foolish enough to do that by accident. 

“Laurie, what were you thinking?” she said aghast.

He seemed utterly uninterested in the matter, his face expressionless.

A heightened sense of anxiety came over Aurora causing her to stutter.

“I can’t l-l-leave her like that. We have to go, to go, to go b-back, otherwise…”

Yet Laurie seemed utterly unmoved by her pleas.

“Laurie?” she said in a whisper.

A long silence was exchanged between them, the surprise on Aurora’s face turning into an expression of horror. He had left her mother at the mercy of the Death Eaters, he had left her mother to die.

Then, even more unnervingly, Laurie let out a garrulous chuckle, a friendly cantankerous laugh that seemed to say more than any words. The grief, the resentment, the bitterness of their plight was exposed merely through his cackling heckle.

“Look under the bundle,” he explained.

With a strong sense of trepidation, Aurora followed his finger to the navy pile of woollen sheets across the other side of the campfire.  
She bent down, and turned back to Laurie. 

He made a tipping gesture and Aurora, almost too traumatised to respond in any other way, opened up the pile, peering underneath. Below the pile of cloth, lay the unconscious body of Rodolphus Lestrange. 

The Death Eater was tightly bound, from shoulder to ankle, and having been beaten into unconsciousness, he was littered with fresh cuts that complicated his facial features. Swelling had obscured one of his eyes from view, but sure enough it was him alright.

“Laurie,” said Aurora, quivering somewhat, turning her gaze back in his direction, “I don’t understand.”

Laurie’s face had changed. 

The implacable visage of only seconds ago had morphed into an expression of unhinged anger and fury. Though it wasn’t his curled lip and slanted eyebrows that exposed his ire, but his eyes. His pupils were now dilated to the point of undiluted rage.

Before Aurora’s could even think of reaching for her wand, his boot came down on her forehead. 

The last thing she glimpsed was the enveloping white of the clouds above.

She didn’t even feel her body hit the ground.


	23. Nightfall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora finds herself in even greater danger, as a secret of sinister significance is finally told.

It wasn’t the howling wind that woke Aurora from her imposed stupor. 

Nor was it the throbbing pain radiating through her skull, plaguing her dormancy with a burning unease.

Instead it was a rush, a toxic surge tainting her bloodstream, that dragged Aurora back into the mercilessness of reality.

The transition, the feeling of a poison tarnishing her veins and weighing down her limbs, was impossible to resist.

It constricted her throat, sending shocks down her spine, springing Aurora bolt upright from the floor.

She woke with a gasp.

As if winded, her ribs heaved, her bones sore as she inhaled.

More alarmingly, her vision was little more than a macabre dance in front of her eyes, spots flickering across her sightline. Try as she could, with her lungs starched of breath, she was unable to determine her surroundings, seeing only muddy browns and greys alert her senses. Nothing tangible could be deciphered through the bacchanal of light. 

Thus she was compelled to merely wait, for air to sift back into diaphragm, to ease her erratic chest and for her vision to revert to normal. 

After a few panicked moments her breath returned, accompanied by the widening of her airways. It now swirling through her lungs like a breezy cavern gust. 

She rubbed her eyes and, feeling her limbs still tainted by some sort of corruption, it took her great effort to drag her fingers across the skin. Yet it helped, for within a minute her vision had also returned to normal, and now she could focus on the more substantial issues bewildering her mind. 

It was only when Aurora looked up, that the situation started to become clearer. 

Laurie was sitting on an isolated wicker chair, faced towards her struggling body. 

He was smiling, an expression of satisfied contentment that was reminiscent of the face he would reserve for solving a quagmire in gobstones or in making a pithy observation about another student at school. It was a trivial mien of glee, rather than any look of profound happiness.

Yet he had betrayed her, it must have meant more to him than this.

The shadow of his seat also illuminated the sparse nature of their surroundings. The bare, minimalist wood panelled walls that surrounded them held no materials or items. 

They were bereft of any sort of equipment, but the Spartan décor and the marriage of cobwebs across the cracks in the ceiling and doorframe were enough to imply they were in a shed. 

A suggestion corroborated by the stench of grass trimmings and paint, perhaps from magical tools formerly of residence within the confines, along with the block window to the darkness beyond.

The sky was black here too, but of a clearer, erudite kind. 

Rather than magically imposed, this was one of nature’s expressions, giving her a jarring sense of how long she had been out for. 

“Laurie, where am I?” Aurora asked. “What just happened to me? What did you do?”

He was looking at her, not at her face, but below her neck.

Aurora first construed this as her breasts, and a sense of bitterness at Laurie’s creeping callousness began to tinge her thoughts. The slow burn, however, of these destructive feelings was swept away by a more alarmed array of reactions when she realised he was looking at her sternum.

Protruding from the centre of her chest was a striped dart, uncannily similar to the one she had fired successfully into Lestrange’s foot, significantly limiting him and allowing her to corner the Death Eater at the station. It was the spare she had put in her pocket that morning. 

It was resting maybe four inches from her skin, sticking out from her ragged blouse. The dart was effortlessly embedded into her skin and bone, yet she couldn’t feel its presence. The spike merely propped there with ease. 

Instead the feeling of the toxins from the instrument had stimulated Aurora’s resting mind into fevered activity. They had seeped into the fibres of her being, and now it was too late to change anything.

Laurie had bested her. 

He had knocked her cold and woken her from her sleep with the spare dart in her chest pocket. It had been grotesquely turned on its own maker.

He was a smart wizard; he knew what it would do. 

It would corrupt her blood, temporarily at least, and prevent Aurora from performing any magic whatsoever. It would also be an intimidating kick starter into consciousness.

She was a plaything to him now. 

“What have you done?” gasped Aurora, looking to prise the dart from her body. 

“Uh uh,” said Laurie with a tut, pointing his wand at Aurora. “The dart stays in for now”.

“Why?” gasped Aurora.

“It might not be hurting still, but it is still doing its work. It takes five minutes for it to be fully effective. Something even you should know about considering you used the damn things like candy back in China. But then again, you were never one for details,” laughed Laurie bitterly.

He had changed into a robe, of scarlet red, but otherwise he looked markedly similar to earlier that morning, with plaid trousers, and bare feet creaking on the pine floor. 

“Oh Rory,” he then said, “you foolish, foolish girl. Look at what you gave up. Betraying me, when you had so much potential.”

“I was trying to save you,” said Aurora, in a voice that betrayed the pleading nature of her situation. 

“Save me? Save me?” said Laurie, with another virulent remonstration. “What from? Your own inadequacies perhaps?”

“You want to kill everyone,” protested Aurora, “to make amends for Lola. To act as needs must. I get it Laurie, I get it! But you’re callous and ruthless in a way that tears everyone else’s lives apart. I was saving you from yourself.”

With a shake of the head Laurie got up from his chair. He looked down at Aurora, surveying her with a look of disdain. She remained sitting upright on the floor and did her best to follow his eyes, to show she was unafraid. 

He leant in. 

“You are a murderer, just like me. A killer, a renegade, and a bloodthirsty bitch. You’re just not a very good one,” he snarled.

Laurie turned away, looking towards the door as he said, “You were going to kill Rodolphus Lestrange. Or, to be precise, you were going to let your sweet, sweet Dad do it and thus exempt you from any moral implications. You talk big but you are too scared to do what is right to ensure justice. Your father understood to an extent, more than meddlesome Dumbledore ever has with his band of merry pansies. But even Gideon screwed up! Just like his useless off spring, botching plans, and giving others the chance to act. Now he is dead!”

“Shut up! Shut up about my Dad!” shouted Aurora.

Triggering a raging fit, she thought every word in magical lexicon, aiming at Laurie’s head with each curse. The words had no effect, her efforts at magical coming to no avail. Rather with every cognitive incantation, her limbs began to throb, the toxins flooding her muscles and subduing her magical blood. 

She spat, muttered and cursed until her body ached to the verge of paralysis.  
Laurie found her failed attempts to be rather humorous, derisive as Aurora went to her last resort.

“Stupefy” she shouted, hoping the verbal expression would change something.

Nothing happened.

Laurie now looked at her with a tangible sense of pity.

“You screwed up,” he whispered. “You ruined our plans. You ruined our chance.”

Aurora stared at Laurie with a fierce sense of disapproval.

She said, finally, “What are you up to Laurie? Why are you doing this?”

“When we first met,” he said, as if ignoring her questions, “I was honest. I omitted a few things but realistically, I was markedly open with you. As you were with me, considering the circumstances.”

He adjusted his cloak, before returning back to the solitary chair, “I had been in Luxembourg, as I said, and Lola had been brutally murdered, as I had also said. We then worked together for a while and found the sick son of a bitch who had killed those we loved: Lola and Rupert. But I think I failed to convey how much I wanted justice.”

Aurora was beginning to tremble, to the point that her arms began to sag, struggling to prop her arching frame above the floor. Laurie ignored her difficulties, and instead spoke with increasing vigour.

“You see,” he explained, “our first meeting was not by chance. I was using the Leaky Cauldron as an eavesdropping den, and I knew you would come back once I heard about precious Rupert. I saw a person I could mould to our task. Not an equal, heavens no! But a possible helping hand. I took all emotion out of it, and waited for one of my triggers to alert me to your arrival.”

She knew of much of this already, but as soon as he said the word “triggers” her mind cast back to that day of the funeral, with a clarity and readiness that had vacated her being for the past few weeks. 

There was a man who acted suspiciously that day, with cuts and a limp and an eccentric turn of phrase, even for him.

“Ollivander….”

“Yes, with his wilting frazzled demeanour. He had been trying to fight my Imperius Curse for days, but I was firm with him. You would have to get a new wand, a Ministry informant told me it broke on the train. Oh I have all sorts of contacts! It’s how I know you screwed up at the Department of Mysteries and that your father is dearly departed. Anyway, I knew you would need Ollivander and he alerted me with a note before you had even reached the pub. It was difficult though, as I had to construct the whole affair as if it was by seeming chance. Otherwise it would be orchestrated too clearly, it would set alarm bells off. even in your thick skull.”

Aurora was still confused, none of this seemed to be leading anywhere.

“I still see that you aren’t catching on,” tutted Laurie, “well, let me explain it to you this way.”

He got off of his chair once more and opened his cloak, exposing his torso, coloured in a red hand print. 

“I am serving a higher cause,” he announced proudly. 

She recognised it at once, the confusions distilled to clarity as she said, “You, you’re in the Vigilant?”

“Not just in the Vigilant,” he smirked, looming over with a sense of accomplishment, “I founded it!”

“I created it: five months ago. On my return I found a world free of justice, of honest accountability and repentance. We are magical people, and yet we live in a world ruled by cowards, losing a war against evil murderers with foul notions of purity. What we need is a law with teeth! One that can bite back against the monsters terrorising us.”

He paused before saying, in an ominous undertone, “No one paid the price for Lola’s death, and I want to ensure that the world knew that some of us would no longer tolerate such complacency.”

It was no good, the physical effort of propping her body weight was overwhelming. The toxins had taken their toll. She went to pull out the dart, but Laurie shook his head once more.  
Every part of her being wanted to collapse flat on her back, but she had to resist somehow to prove she wasn’t a doormat, or somehow inferior to Laurie. As agonising as it felt, she would cling upright, hearing Laurie’s damning words to their bitter ends. 

“So, I found like-minded thinkers in the Ministry, some who were friends of my father, and others who wanted a strong authority to combat the evil of our times. They were the people I called “contacts” when talking to you. They are the only people doing anything to protect us.”

Aurora could only look at him with disgust. He was more reckless than she could ever have been. He was stirring the damned of society for his own ends of revenge, and for a vicious notion of reparation for the crimes of others. Laurie was condemning all of them to their deaths, dividing the side that fought Voldemort even further than it has been before. Not that Laurie cared about this.

“Together,” he crowed, “we recruited covertly behind the Ministry’s back and ensured swift justice to those that slipped through the net of the law!”

“You’re mad, utterly utterly insane,” spluttered Aurora.

She shook her head before saying, “You’re a mob, a thuggish conglomerate that terrorises people to get your way. You take advantage of those who have lost loved ones. You cause bloodshed and pretend it is justice. People died in those protests at Diagon Alley. You give false answers to the most desperate in society.”

“We bring justice,” scowled Laurie, stamping his foot. “We give people teeth, the ability to bite back.”

“You are condemning all of us to Voldemort. Destroying the remaining embers of wizarding society for your childish perceptions of what is right and wrong!”

She had done it, belittling his beliefs, trivialising Lola’s death. She was expecting a beating, or a furious rebuke, but Laurie merely circled her a few times before speaking in a slow, contemplative tone.

“At first I thought you’d understand. Originally I wanted to see if you’d be of use beyond avenging Lola. I was auditing you really, to see what you were made of. In some ways you excelled. Your magical talent, your intuitive skill at charms, and an undeniable determination to achieve were never in question. You can improvise too, more than I’d have imagined. But you’re soft. You’ll always be soft. You are a victim to every emotion you have ever had and you’re too easy to trick, fool and play.”

“Says the man bleeding his heart to me, wearing a bright coloured cape,” rebutted Aurora.  
This earned a sharp rebuke from Laurie, “I expect your batty mother will have been torn to shreds by the Death Eaters now, come to think of it. You were careless to leave her to the mercy of murderers, and even more of a fool to trust her with me.”

He cracked his knuckles. 

“You failed me, said Laurie. “First off with your shambles after fighting Rosier, giving me a moralistic sermon. Then, when you tricked me, betrayed me, and ruined a best kept plan. A plan of a greater deception that would not have been a mere blind effort to catch a goon in a maze. They wanted us to do that. Between you and your father you couldn’t even realise you were being played? I wanted to go direct to Rodolphus and damn it would have worked! But you butchered my attempts with your skulduggery. It doesn’t matter that some of my Vigilant brothers came to my flat and revived me. Nor does it matter that we pieced together your useless plan. It was all too late! My chance at avenging Lola is gone! She will never see justice thanks to you!”

Aurora could only close her eyes, a tread of remorse reverberating through her, as Laurie finished by saying, “She was only twenty years old, just like Rupert.”

There was a long pause, a meandering silence before either of them spoke again. Aurora had both palms flat against the floor, amazed at Rodolphus’ ability to run and escape from her clutches with such poisons echoing through his body.

For the third time, Aurora looked at the dart, sticking from her chest, and turned to Laurie, who shook his head and raised his wand once more. 

He took it as a prompt to address her one final time, injured and helpless on the ground of a shed.

“The truth is I would have been happy to part terms as equals if you had trusted my plan,” he explained. “It was clear from the time we had spent together that we wouldn’t see eye to eye on the Vigilant. In Hogsmeade, with your bit of post-match theatre, I realised that was out of the question. Those who sought justice would have continued our quest, and you could have kissed and made up with that old fool, Dumbledore, and gone off together prattling about your beaker!”

“Dumbledore may be a fool,” spat Aurora, “but when he realises that the Vigilant is led by a failed academic I don’t think he’d hesitate in crushing you like a bug.”

“It’s over Rory,” shrugged Laurie. “Dumbledore doesn’t care. Where is he? Not here that is for sure. He cares more about old trinkets and politics than he does about you.”

“It won’t stop him coming for you. You left my mother to die, you are the coldest bastard in the land, and the Resistance will destroy your rabble within weeks or months.”

Laurie was passionless with his explanation, “You cost me justice. So it is only fair that I left your mother to Bellatrix’s mercy.”

“You saying we’re even?” hissed Aurora. “Because as soon as this dart wears off, you’re a dead man.”

“Bold thing, aren’t you?”, said Laurie, taking hold off the chair and placing it against the wall to Aurora’s left. 

“Unfortunately,” he continued, ‘it isn’t as simple as a parting of the ways, that chance has gone.”

He strode towards the door of the shed, unlocking a padlock adorned across it’s handle with a manual key.

As if hoping to avoid eye contact with the deliberation of his next words, he kept his focus away from Aurora as he said, “I hate to admit it, but part of me still felt the way I did six years ago. I don’t regret leaving you, but I loved you once for sure. And damn, you fuck better than anything I have ever felt in my life. So what is about to happen isn’t personal.”

His voice cracked at the end, betraying the opposite reality. Aurora could deduce that whatever he was talking about couldn’t be good for her. 

“What?” she said.

“The Vigilant want justice” he explained pulling the door open. 

Immediately a whistling draft resonated through the rough confines of the shed.

“You violated our cause,” he said, turning to her again, with a glint, possibly a tear, in his eye. “In the views of my brothers and sisters, you are no better than Rodolphus Lestrange, who we are burning tonight.”

He then gestured to the world outside their tight surroundings, raising a hand out the door. Within seconds, Laurie had company. 

Announcing their presence as their bare, dirty, blackened soles thudded against the floor, six women, all wearing sack cloth attire and red face paint like those from Diagon Alley a fortnight ago, entered the room. 

They were defying the cold of the outdoors, the world below a fallen sun in the peaks of Scotland. 

The six of them were all taller than Aurora, who was by no means short at five and a half feet, with muscular bodies that suggested a history of confrontation. Even two of them which appeared north of fifty appeared rather formidable. 

Between them they carried a tub, perhaps four foot in depth and as long as a bath, filled with water. Next to the spare candles lighting the shed, it made the introduction of the water rub initially appear rustically romantic, but truthfully Aurora imagined the use of the tank would be much more sinister. 

Plonking it down between Laurie and Aurora without even a hint of a grimace or groan, they also revealed a bucket filled with cloth, stained red. They left it by the container before returning back to the threshold of the door like an armed guard. 

All the while their facial features were as expressionless as a mannequin. Their hair was also tied with string into rough ponytails – the styles identical between the half-dozen of them. Only their eyes, which were lit up: dilated in a portrayal of childlike glee, betrayed their cultish confidence. It was unnerving to Aurora, even more so when Laurie explained.

“And we are burning Rodolphus this nightfall, but only after we have sent you to the flames.”

Aghast, Aurora leapt to her feet, a fresh rush of adrenalin washing through the throbbing pain of the dart, which remained embedded into her chest.

With a look of disappointment, bordering on pity, he pulled out the dart from her chest and chucked it out the open door. The sensation caused another shortage of breath. She wobbled slightly, but kept her footing, taking out her wand as she panted for air.

“You can point that thing all you want, it will do nothing for you now,” he said.

He clicked his fingers and the six women moved from the doorway to the interior of the shed, closing in on Aurora. Laurie was halfway out the door, before in desperation, Aurora said the last thing she could to get the man she had once loved to reconsider. 

She shouted, “What will your parents think, Laurie, of what you have become?”

Laurie stopped and turned back to look at Aurora, eyes narrowed. 

“Those cowards? Who fled to America? They are no family of mine,” he said bitterly. “The Vigilant are the only family I have now. A family with connections across the Ministry, with members of society from the poorest to the richest. We will teach the criminals and thugs to fear us. We will destroy Gorgeous George’s racket. Then we will take on the Death Eaters themselves. We are the many, the victors, who will use our influence to create a better world. The ash of your bones will be the roots of our beginning!”

The six women inched towards her. Their identities difficult to decipher with such passive expressions and red paint, they were almost like the demonic force of a nightmare. 

Aurora knew there was little else she could do. She screwed up her right fist and swung a punch, aiming at the oldest looking lady to her right, whilst with her left hand she pointed her wand and thought the word “Stupefy” as clearly as she could, targeting Laurie. 

It was a fruitless effort. 

The wand refused to cooperate with her wishes, remaining still. Her left arm throbbed from the effort, the blood in her muscles being suppressed by the poisons in her veins. The maple wand dropped out of her grasp, whilst her right fist could only perform a slovenly swing. The dart, and the toll of the past few hours, had reduced her arm to a lumbering limb, that was easily held and caught by the lady five decades senior to her age. 

She tried to yank her arm free, but the lady kept her hand clasped over her forearm. Aurora did the only thing she could do, and spat phlegm into the old lady’s eye, mirroring Bellatrix’s treatment of her. As far as Aurora she was concerned they were as bad as Bellatrix. Six women converted by the megalomania of her former love to burn her to death. 

Again, like when she had provoked Laurie, she expected a powerful punch in return, only to find the lady utterly unbothered by her dirty rebuke, merely continuing to hold Aurora’s arm in place. 

Laurie, shadowing their inexpressive appearances, went over to Aurora and pulled her wand from her grip, and then closed the matter with one final comment. An emotional gut punch delivered with complete dispassion. 

“One last thing,” he announced. “When you were sixteen you told me you wanted to end your life in my company, to be with me forever. Well, I never took you to our garden sheds the time you came to visit, but you sure loved the moors of my former home. It will be your final resting place.”

With that he left, closing the door, abandoning Aurora to the six women.

Her resistance was an irrelevance. 

They took hold of her with ease, no matter how much she struggled and writhed.  
Pulling apart her clothes, they exposed her naked flesh before lifting her off her feet and submerging her into the water of the bath. 

Then without any hesitation, four of them grabbed a limb each and scrubbed the dirt and dried blood from her body. It was rough with the feeling of an abrasive rag scratching her skin as they scoured her pours. She spat and screamed, trying to pull free, but it was to no avail. Their expressions remained completely unreadable, their grips impossibly strong.  
The other two women had conjured sharp shears and were cutting her hair, piercing through its wavered tips in a straight line. They deprived it of its sleek length before marinating it in the water of the tub. She felt pressure on her forehead as it was pushed down under the water for seconds at a time in a disturbing ritual. 

As she coughed and spluttered, one of the witches moved on to cutting her fingernails, whilst another reached for the bucket.

The bucket stank, something she only realised once in close proximity to the container. As if expecting resistance, two of the women took hold of her by the shoulders, as another of them poured the contents into the bath. 

Instantly the liquid diffused through the water, colouring it a vile red. 

When it began to clot on her skin, she realised it was blood.

She wanted to scream again but the shock seemed to arrest her body functions. They smeared the fluid across her body. In particular, the women focused on staining her face, holding her eyelids down to ensure they were even webbed in a dense hue. 

It was nauseating, a suffocating stench, and knowing it was probably animal blood rather than that of a human hardly helped ease her mind or violated body.

One effect of the blood, possibly through an enchantment, was the drying effect it had on her skin. Thick streams of the liquid had dried and cracked over her flesh and pores, drying her wet ribs and torso. Her rear too, now caked in the blood that had soaked the underside of the tin, felt as dry as a bone. The coloured water now seemed to have no impact on her skin, which had tried an inconsistent red across her body. 

Before she could conjure up even a moment to resist the sack clothed warriors, taciturn and hardy in the winter cold, they lifted her from the bath and set her onto what appeared to be a towel laid out on the floor. It was only when her flesh, exposed to them once again, brushed the material that she realised it was sack cloth, like the garments stretched across her captors.  
Without hesitation, they yanked her arms through the holes in the cloth, before wrapping the material around her body and securing it with string. 

The largest of the women, with sable hair and a continuing blankness in her demeanour, was holding a much larger length of rope. Cottoning on, Aurora did her best to wrestle herself upright, to somehow push her way out of the shed with the benefit of surprise.

Instead, the others took hold of her ascending shoulders and shoved her back to the floor. Then, as if dismissively swatting a fly, they flipped her over so that she was on her stomach, the weight of one of the women’s knees pressed into her shoulder blades. 

Aurora felt her wrists being pushed together, straining her shoulders as the flesh of the opposing limbs touched. Thick rope was wrapped across the skin and tightened into a knot, binding her arms behind her back. Further resilient cords were secured around her body, constricting her chest and pinning her arms to her torso. Her shoulders were equally restricted, before someone took hold of her legs. With the itchy sack cloth now pressed into her skin by her bonds, her bare legs were likewise tied up. Her ankles were banded together, then so were her knees and thighs, so that from head to toe, her body was encased in a cocoon of knotted rope. 

She couldn’t move a muscle, and was thus unable to resist when she was rolled over once more. A hefty foot had to press down on her side to stop her tumbling across the room, keeping her flat on her back. 

She looked up at the six of them, these women of the Vigilant. 

They remained as unreadable as before, expressionless whilst doing their grisly duty. They had moved so fast, restraining Aurora with such ease, that she hadn’t even really had time to think of a way out, to think of a plan. 

Nor until now, as they momentarily paused, had she considered whether she wanted to. With her mother consigned to a brutal fate at the frustrated Death Eaters’ hands, and with her father unmistakeably dead and with her mission for Rupert’s justice failing so spectacularly, perhaps it was a fair punishment?

But for whatever reason, as she was being prepared to meet her maker, by six women she didn’t even know, at the behest of a brat and his army of glorified servants, she wanted to live, to make it out of this.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to get any easier for her to defy the odds, as the broadest woman, with blonde hair and a scarred face that not even the paint could hide, leant down and pinched Aurora’s nostrils. 

Momentarily she struggled, hoping to hold her breath and maybe defy them through spite. Yet eventually she wheezed for air. Prepared for this, the elder lady, who Aurora now saw had a slight tremor in her right hand, motioned to one of the other four who came forward with a balled cloth. 

She stuffed it in Aurora’s open mouth, drying her tongue and widening her jaw to a humiliating degree. The elder lady then revealed another length of rope and tied it around Aurora’s cheeks, securing the gag, preventing Aurora from any effort of speech. 

The six women lifted Aurora’s tied body, now resembling little more than a coiled bundle, off the ground, each of them taking a part of her body under their arm. 

The ritual, of physical force and conquest, had left Aurora humiliatingly powerless as she was exposed to cold air of the outdoors. The shed door had been opened, subjecting her face, red coloured and the perhaps the only surface of flesh bare to the winds, to the turbulent winter weather.

Aurora was unable to see much, her face positioned towards the ground, only noticing the blur of grass and mud and hearing the squelching of the women’s feet.

It was only after a few minutes, with the women showing no sign of slacking in their grip, and with her face numb from the drop in temperature, that the smell of naked flames permeated through her nostrils.

Being the only airwave she was still able to breathe out of, the coarse aroma of the fire did enough to dizzy her, causing the already uneven sight of the ground to become so turbulent within her vision that it appeared to almost spin.

Before she could decipher any understanding of the situation, the women turned sharply to the left, past what she assumed were some fir trees that tickled her feet as they brushed past them. A voice, a Scottish burr, greeted their arrival with vigorous joy.

“Ah, sisters of justice,” he said, trundling towards them, snapping twigs and branches under bare foot.

The women withdrew their arms, dropping Aurora to the ground. She hit the floor with a thud, rolling on to her side, but now somewhat able to discern what was going on.

They were in Laurie’s garden as she expected, on a spit of lawn that was planted over the stone plateau. When she had visited the house six years ago, it had been an isolated, manicured garden amongst the expanse of marshes and swamps. 

On the eastern side, where she had watched the sun rise with Laurie one morning, they had nestled amongst a few old fir trees that had stood proudly within the rock, as if magically charmed. 

She could just about tilt her head, even though the rope chafed whatever feeling was left in her stretched cheeks. It confirmed to her these realisations, whilst she could also see in the swamps below a host of orange lights and clouds of smoke that tinged the night sky a charcoal grey.

Aurora had tried her best to withhold any suggestions of fear, and she knew that Laurie wasn’t referring to some sort of figurative burning, yet seeing her own eyes the horror below silenced every voice of rebellion in her body. It traumatised her senses, the melting of flesh and crumbling of bone being a more vivid terror than any werewolf claw or Bellatrix blade. She quivered, a point not unnoticed by the fresh arrival.

“That’s right lassie, you’re in for one hell of a show,” he said, leaning in, exposing his green eyes and shock of black hair to her vision. 

He wore sack cloth like the others, and was smeared in blood too, but it didn’t stop Aurora from recognising his face. 

He was Hephaestus Dashford, a Ministry worker, possibly one of Laurie’s “contacts” but also a family friend of Gideon Meadows. He had even attended Rupert’s funeral. Yet here he was betraying her, sending her to a hideous death, only minutes after her father had met his maker.

It was enough to enliven her emotions. 

As the man waved off the women who walked out of view in a purposeful march, perhaps to the swamp below, Aurora kicked, shook and struggled for dear life, but it was no good. The ropes wouldn’t budge. 

With one spell she could have been free, but every time she tried, yelling behind the cloth, her arms began to ache, in a palpably draining way that was distinctive from the rope burn. Hephaestus, humming a tune, took all of this in his stride, moving out of her sightline before coming back with another length of rope, this one attached to a curved shiny hook.

He lifted up Aurora’s legs and secured the metal to her lower bonds and then tested the rope.  
She had no idea where it led to, but as he tampered with its consistency, she could feel her legs going up and down like a weather vane, the pressure would be too powerful to resist. Eventually however, he was satisfied, and after gesturing with a lit wand to the world beyond the plateau he turned back to her with a satisfied grin.

“Bon voyage Miss Meadows, enjoy hell with your cowardly parents, give Gideon my fine regards,” he proclaimed with a mirthless cackle, before stepping away.

She heard it before she could feel it. 

The clanking of a chain, the turning of an axel, the purring of a mechanism.

The rope tightened, stretching her ankles momentarily before the wet ground gave way and she slid across the lawn. 

She picked up pace, speeding through the mud like a toboggan. Wet dirt splattered across her face, obscuring her vision to mere flecks. The ground then firmed underneath, causing her to skip up and down, unable to resist like a wayward vessel before a storm. The ropes cushioned her as she knocked against the rock and silt, did little for her nerves. 

She thought herself a fool, but even Aurora knew that this was the end of the plateau, within seconds she would be airborne. 

Aurora did what she could, leaning forward slightly, straining her neck, forcing the cloth further down her throat but desperate to avoid any impact the stone.

Sure enough, she avoided the perils of the rock face, but could do nothing to stop her descent to the consuming darkness below.

A palpable sense of weightlessness came over her as she descended, reaching an intense speed within seconds, before an immense pressure built up in her ankles. Blood rushed to hear head as she was propelled upside down before the momentum of her descent was arrested.

She was swaying upside down, hanging from a line taut and firm, maybe ten feet from the plateau she had been pushed off. Then the grinding of a metal could be heard from above, spitting hot sparks that kissed the remnants of her hair. She was pulled along into the night, from some sort of mechanism out of her sight.

Her vision soon became greeted with the lustre of orange light, the fumes of torches below her head. Finally she could discern something of her bearings as she was pulled across the marsh, to dozens of orange flames maybe forty feet below. 

She could make out the sack cloth shirts and the red face paint, and beacons were scattered through the mud, lighting the ground in a way that the torches could not. Exposing her to their sight, like some sort of exhibition. 

It hurt her, pushing her head forward, but now with the greeting of light, she could make out a metal pole well above her, pulling the extension rope, and thus her into the swampy clearing. 

Her arrival was greeted with catcalls, whistles and jeers, some even booed as she came into vision. They were animated like febrile ants, scatted across the earth, leaping from the ground. To her left, she could make out a wooden scaffold, from which Laurie stood in his scarlet cape, alongside the trussed body of Rodolphus Lestrange. They were merely ten feet away, raised as they were above the crowds. Laurie was taking no notice of her, instead riling his audience into a cacophony of noise. 

The rope then turned on a metal axel above, rotating her, steering her west, until she hanged upside-down in front of the wooden structure, beholden to the baying mob.

Not for the first time that day, she couldn’t think of a way out of this.

Laurie held up his arm, and brought it down in a simmering motion, ceasing the cries of the crowd. 

Without another word, he gestured to two men at the front, who pulled back the grass below their feet, revealing there to be little more than a tarpaulin below the scaffold. A deep pit was exposed under the sheet, which Laurie pointed at with his wand. 

Immediately the soil burst into flame, agitated into a roar of purple heat that shot up into the sky. Aurora tried to somehow swing out of the way but the axel was unresponsive. 

Thankfully however, the flame rested a mere few metres from her face. Even more fortuitously, the flame, though deadly, did not possess the smoky characteristics of natural fire, and she didn’t choke on its intimate presence.

Instead her eyes were simply arrested by the purity of the light. 

She had set her mind to work, thinking of some sort of way out the increasingly dire situation. Though nothing come to mind and from below the flames, Laurie addressed his crowd.

“My friends,” he said, so loudly that no skills with the wand were required to amplify his voice, “this is our time, it has finally come. Today, we gather all as one. As a force to enact justice. To mark such an august occasion, we have a Death Eater in our hands, who will die in the company of his victims.”

“Come forward, brave ones,” he then announced.

There was shuffling in the crowds, murmurs even.

“These three in front of me suffered from Rodolphus’ evil hand, and now they will find solace in his death. As others of you have done from the criminals we have brought to justice, and the Ministry traitors we have driven from their places of work.”

The crowd cheered again, rapturously. Aurora was too rattled to continue thinking, for the cult like nature of their embrace of a man she knew had few answers was harrowing to behold. They had been a gang of vigilantes protecting neighbours from crime and protesting Ministry decisions, and now they were a mob prepared for murder.

“We have struggled and struggled for these opportunities. You have all played your part. Friends in the Ministry, who can see it for what it is, friends on the street, fighting Gorgeous George’s gangs, and the friends of our homes, protecting muggles and vulnerable wizards alike from the cowardly nature of the Dark Side. Furthermore, those among you who have fought the Death Eaters. Who exposed Wilkes as a Death Eater to our eyes, who captured Rodolphus, and who revived me. You were among friends of my father, and have been ever so courageous since Lola died.”

It was frightening: his absolutist terms, his forceful oratory, his sincerity. 

The Laurie she knew was sharp, powerful and occasionally bitter, but he never had such strengths in his convictions before, or such self-confidence. Nor was he so shamelessly manipulative with the pain of others, and it appeared that the admirable drops of compassion in his nature had been washed away by the pain of the loss of his sister.  
Whatever Laurie was now; it wasn’t the one she knew.

It had all been an act since he had returned to her life. 

“And now,” he then barked, with an additional hint of venom, “we come on to the first order of business. Now I know you all want to see that Death Eater burn, but we have an appetiser to start the proceedings.”

Even when swinging upside down, with a head heavy from the transition of her blood-flow, she could feel the eyes looking at her from the other side of the flame. 

“Aurora Jane Meadows,” he announced, “the only daughter of Gideon Meadows. The cowardly wallflower who has obstructed any attempts of justice with demands for so-called due process, and for trials for murderers. The shorthand for indulging monsters, for giving mercy only to those who have oppressed, not to those who have suffered.”

The crowd hissed, a serpentine screech that withered even the flame momentarily with the volley of spittle that emanated from their mouths. 

“I am glad to report,” said Laurie, “that Gideon Meadows is no longer with us. Within the past hour, he has deceased.”

Sickening to Aurora, this brought a hearty applause from the crowd. She tried to pull against the bonds on her wrists, knowing that might have had a small chance of writhing free if she could free her arms. The knot was too firm, and out of the reach of her hands. 

Laurie continued, “His daughter was of great assistance in that, however unintentional. She certainly proved valuable to the Death Eaters pursuing him! Yet her crime is not one of idiocy, but in her damaging attempt to obstruct justice. She did her best to ruin our plans, to deprive Rodolphus’ victims a chance to take part in their own revenge. She has brought solace to the wicked instead.” Aurora resented his efforts to not personalise the events. He was more affected, in every negative way, by Rodolphus Lestrange. He had only mentioned Lola once to the crowds, the person he had tirelessly sought revenge for, even at the cost of his own humanity. She expected him to frame her so callously, as if she were a Death Eater possibly of some kind, it made it easier to simplify matters.

She was glad he was obscured from her view, putting a distance between them that could highlight the morally twisted nature of his speech.

As they booed her once again, the realisation came to her that the fighting was futile.  
She said this not out of resignation, but acceptance. Whatever mistakes she had made, whatever faults she had, she would never become what Laurie was today. 

If those wizards and witches of older times were right, and she had a soul of some kind, a notion she had resisted for decades, then she would at least be with her family soon.

“Don’t worry. This isn’t how it will end for you. When you awake, speak to Dumbledore, he will need you now more than ever,” whispered a voice in her ear. 

Huh, thought Aurora, rocking slightly within her bonds. 

The voice. That voice. It was Meridia.

The woman who had saved her within those dreams.

A doyen from the beaker.

Instinctively she peered through the flame, yet it was futile. She glanced to her left and right and saw no hints. 

It must have been imagined, she thought.

Meanwhile, Laurie was calming down the crescendo of boos, the virulent heckling of the mob, before addressing the crowd again.

Aurora felt the rope wobble slightly.

“This,” he said, making Aurora wobble again, “is what evil is. It is like a rope: powerful, tough, strong, resilient. But all it takes it right cut, or the right tug, and it is defeated, and with it the world it props up.”

She knew he was gesturing at her, suggesting Aurora was some manifest of that evil. 

“Aurora Jane Meadows,” he shouted, “on this day, November 26th 1976, I sentence you to die. To burn until dead in the flames below. For justice!”

“For justice!” he cried to the crowd back in defiant unison. 

She took one last look at the flames before shutting her eyes.

In this life I did all I could, it was my best, she thought. 

Aurora waited for the rope to be cut, for her to descend into the pit below. 

Such a severance never arrived. 

Instead a series of bangs ringed through Aurora’s ears followed by the cry of…

“DUMBLEDORE!” 

“Get him!” cried Laurie. “Kill him and all his friends.”

Laurie was screaming, ranting and raving, his voice only obscured by the crashing sounds of spell craft, colours bursting into the sky, swirling into a tornado of light at the behest of the virulent wind.

He was here. 

After all this time, he had come.

Aurora tossed and turned but still the ropes held, as she swayed from side to side she did her best to peer beyond the flames, to get some grounding on what was happening. Only what was audible to her ears gave her any sense of bearing, the whooshes of air suggesting fresh arrivals, the crashes and bangs suggesting conflict.

She tried pushing the cloth from her mouth with her tongue, hoping to call for help, yet it was the actions of others that fully exposed her location.

“Get the fire out!” roared a voice, that Aurora at once recognised as Mad-Eye’s. 

“On it!” shouted another, a response that Aurora knew to be Kingsley’s.

White light smothered the purple flames, drinking the vigorous heat from the pit, lowering the flames, exposing her to the battle below.

She could see now, with half the flame gone, the chaos emerging on the moor.

Across the marsh members of the Vigilant fell one by one under the power of the Resistance. Alice Longbottom, utilising the wind, was firing swirling hexes across the swamp, knocking people in to the mud. Another woman, who Aurora had never met but knew to be Edgar Bones’ sister was likewise amongst the carnage, spearheading an attack with Hagrid to her rear, who was brutally knocking seven bells out of one of the women who had tied Aurora to the crane. Others she had heard of such as Emmeline Vance, a friend of her father, and Gideon Prewett, were among the number of arrivals, as were Edgar Bones, Dedalus Diggle and Theodore Morgan, her trusted friend entering the fray. Amadeus clearly had let bygones be bygones, as he emerged from the dark, with a healed skull, and was backing up his brother. Dorcas, her cousin, had also materialised from the dark, at her hour of need, blocking off the fleeing vigilantes. There were however, some formidable fighters amongst the Vigilant, and they were holding on stoically near the scaffold, yet it was only a matter of time before their efforts crumbled. After all Dumbledore was there now, wearing robes of silver and white, twirling his wand in a frenzy, shooting beams of golden light across the marsh. They reflected off the water, and bewildered the red-painted warriors, who dropped their wands in submission at the temporary blindness. 

It contrasted with the tempest of colour above, which danced across the canvas of dark night time cloud. 

A trickling sense of relief began to ease through her body. 

Until it was forcibly dammed by a cry from below.

Kingsley had fallen, knocked out by a stunning spell. 

Laurie, forgoing his cloak to the heat of the battle, stood over him, war paint prominent across his rib cage, his wand in one hand, the knife in the other.

Mirroring Bellatrix Lestrange from only an hour before, one of the Death Eaters he supposedly despised. 

He was in front of the scaffold, only a few feet from the rope that was tied into the marsh. 

She looked down at the flames, they were still eight feet in height, and hot enough to burn. If it was severed, she would still drop to her death. 

It was only him standing now, the last of his friends apparating away, leaving a series of concussed bodies on the floor. 

Yet Laurie was defiant. 

With expert precision he threw his knife across the marsh, aiming at Dumbledore, the weapon soaring through magical manipulation. 

It was going too fast, not even Dumbledore would be a match for it. 

Yet it didn’t matter, for it was a phoenix, sharply descending from the colours above, of a vivid red and gold feather, that took the blade. It sank into his chest as he swooped in front of Dumbledore.

Instantly the bird fell, clouding her view of Dumbledore momentarily. 

Taking advantage of that split second of distraction, Dumbledore fired a blue bolt of lightning from his wand, which crackled with its intensity. 

The other members of the resistance, perhaps a dozen in total, had stopped to observe, and now stood open mouthed at the fierce nature of the spell.

Realising that he wouldn’t be able to fight fire with fire, Laurie had rolled to his right just in time the spell missing him by mere inches. He grabbed hold of the rope by the scaffold, and tugged on the binds.

Aurora shuddered as her body drifted to the left.

For the first time Dumbledore was looking up at her, his face etched with concern.  
Meanwhile, the others had withdrawn from their spectator state, and were now walking towards Dumbledore with their wands aloft, pointing at Laurie.

Amadeus and Kinglsey were approaching from the west whilst Fabian and Dedalus were coming from the east. In addition Alice, Theo, Emmeline, Dorcas, Edgar Bones, and his sister had formed a large block behind Dumbledore, almost like a home guard. Hagrid and Mad-Eye meanwhile, stood either side of the great wizard, with the giant pounding his fist against his hand.

“Leave ‘im to me, Dumbledore,” roared Hagrid, “I will break every bone in his body.”

“No Hagrid,” said Dumbledore softly, still observing Aurora’s vulnerability with what she thought may have been concern, “there shan’t be need of that.”

“Won’t it old man?” screamed Laurie. “You bastards took everything from me, and now you want to bargain with me? Well hear this, one step closer from any of you and I sever this rope with my wand. Then this lying traitorous bitch gets the flame.”

“Enough posturing Dumbledore,” said Kingsley, “let’s just finish him.”

Dumbledore was no longer listening. 

He pointed his wand at what was seemingly a mere patch of filthy marshland.

The ground momentarily shimmered, before Rodolphus’ body, similarly trussed to Aurora’s was revealed on the ground. Utterly immobile, but conscious, he was looking at Laurie and Dumbledore with equal measures of trepidation.

Dumbledore turned back to Laurie with an expression that suggested both pity and disgust.

“No one deserves to die in this way, even monsters,” he said.

“Not even you,” sneered Laurie, “greatest monster of them all? You’re a liar old man. You cheat people, you burn their hopes, destroy everything they ever loved, and keep secrets. Then you hope your false halo will save you. You were never there for me, or for any of us victims of an evil that you could have saved us from. You played the politician’s game. The one that has damned us all to be feasts for maggots. I doubt you even cared Lola died, let alone any of your alleged friends, like Gideon and Rupert who were killed under your nose.”  
Aurora looked down at the flame.

If he cut the rope, there was nothing they could do. 

“Well,” shouted Laurie, “have at it, I say.”

He went to fire a curse.

But before he could so much as flick his wand, it flew from his grasp, resting now in Dumbledore’s hand.

Then, quick as a flash, Dumbledore pointed with his own wand at the scaffold. 

It vanished with a comical pop, seemingly into thin air, leaving Laurie standing as he were by the naked flame, with the rope still by his side.

“I can pull it from the ground,” he said, yanking the hook embedded into the floor.  
Aurora felt the rope loosen, she was drooping. She cried out, her voice muffled behind the gag.

“Stop,” bellowed Dumbledore, “it isn’t too late to atone for everything you have done Laurie. Surrender to us now, and give yourself the chance to make amends, to put make something of your life.”

Laurie looked up at Aurora.

What was it etched on his face? Remorse? Fear? Despair?

His eyes, beautifully grey bore into her own. 

Then, letting go of the rope, he turned around, and leapt headfirst into the flames.

For the second time that day she passed out, overwhelmed by the world below.


	24. The Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurora witnesses the emergence of a new institution..

Aurora only caught flashes of the world around her.   
Everything was a tinge of blue, sporadically appearing in front of her eyes. The sight of a pair of shoes one second, then long periods of vacant darkness, before the blade of a shovel came across her vision.  
A series of such ambiguous hints revealed themselves to her, continuing with an isolated appearance of pinstriped trouser and glimpses of a bowler hat and of patches of grass, before her eyelids closed and her sight subsided once more.  
She felt weirdly empty, as if hollowed out, her abdomen surprisingly light and airy. Her chin had sunk to one side, the earth gathered across her skin, sculpted around the contours of her face.  
Her hearing however, remained en pointe. Deciphering the visual nature of her surroundings may have been difficult, but she had heard these people before with their moneyed tones.  
In accents clearly from the home counties, they continued their musings, as if the conversation they had the last time Aurora saw them had never ceased.  
“Looks like you were right all along,” said one them  
“Do you think so?” replied the other.  
“She has been through the mill, hasn’t she?” said the first voice.  
“Well, she would have done well to heed our warnings…” pondered the second voice.  
Their voices were only half an octave apart, both female, audible over the sound of them  
heaving dirt from the ground, Aurora hearing it rest on knots of weeds behind them.  
“The heart never listens,” explained one of them, “humans long for their own torment”  
“Good thing we aren’t human, at least not anymore,” said the other nonchalantly.   
“Indeed,” said the first, “but enough sophistry for now, eh?”  
They continued to dig, Aurora’s myopic eyesight showing the occasional clue to her whereabouts. A tomb, marble in tone but too wintry in texture to be anything more than conventional stone, rested a few inches from Aurora’s head. In minute writing layered across its base, Saxon prose had been scrawled in wavy indentations.   
She was able to recognise a few choice words, identical to the ones before, the power of the phrases reverberating through her skull, which suddenly felt heavy once more.   
Devour, Desire, and two new ones: Destroy and Decide.  
Their translations were stark, and reminiscent to the former time in the twins’ company.  
When they had been shovelling earth before, it had made no impact on the ground.  
As if on cue, keys of a piano echoed through the darkness of her now closing eyes.  
“Already?” said one of them.  
“Yes, it seems so,” replied the other.  
They spoke seemingly in unison, increasingly difficult to distinguish, now as if completing each other’s trails of thought.  
“Hmm, how vexing.”  
“Is it not time?”  
“It appears not.”  
“What may appear not, may not be what not is, sister mine.”  
“Perhaps you’re right.”  
“Do you think we will ever leave this place?”  
“Only if what we have determined comes to fruition.”  
“The seer’s daughter, died through her insanity. Through her fall from grace. Leaving wretched Barnabus scorned. There will be some fight to rectify this.”  
“I sense a presence, a dark presence, wanting the powers of this world. Not understanding them.”  
The piano keys chimed again.   
Aurora wanted to observe what was happening but her eyes remained defiantly shut.  
“Looks like you were right.”  
“Knew it.”  
“Careful with that confidence, can’t be complacent with our seven-hundred-year advantage. Otherwise maggot-eyes may re-awaken.”  
“But still, the girl isn’t dead.”  
A shoe prodded Aurora’s armpit, jolting her.  
“No, she must have heard…”  
“That was the plan all along.”  
“Of course, to keep her on the scent. Now we need her to talk to Albus Dumbledore, it’s been a while since he visited.”  
“You hear that,” said one of them, calling into her ear, “Albus Dumbledore.”  
Yellow roses emerged from the blackness behind her closed eyes, seemingly leaking into the depths of her mind. They seemed to suppress every sense in her body until she sank into enveloping mass of petals and thorns.  
Then the vision subsided and she returned to a peaceful pattern of asleep, before awakening within sheets of eiderdown.   
She drifted into consciousness, almost wearyingly, fatigue set within her bones. The gentle flicker of moonlight from the window pane guiding her into the realms of the living.   
Her eyes fluttered open.   
It was a small room, cosy, though relatively simple in its look and design. Through the semi-darkness the walls, minimally lit by the exposure of the shining moon from the hatch window, could be seen to be sparse in decoration. Painted a magnolia hue, a wardrobe rested against one side, a chest of drawers against the other. A collection of delicate instruments lay across a table at the far end, resembling a collection of spoons, glinting somewhat at the tips. Finally, on her left, set into the oak floor boards, which gave off a distinct mustiness, was a generously sized writing desk that engulfed half the room.   
Someone was sitting on its chair, though in friendlier circumstances to the last she woke.  
It was Albus Dumbledore, silver haired and with a look of placid ease behind his half-moon spectacles.   
Aurora did her best to sit up, placing her hands into the mattress, but still felt utterly depleted. She sank back into the sheets, and instead pivoted her shoulder so that she was facing Dumbledore. Only one matter was on her mind.   
“My mother, we left her and I…” stuttered Aurora, stirred by her emotional instincts.  
“Peace,” said Dumbledore, making a shushing sound with his lips.  
“You have questions, no doubt,” explained Dumbledore softly, “and I know this time I can’t really hold them off. As much as you need to rest.”  
He slipped his hand into his robes, and revealed a peculiar implement that resembled an oversized cigarette lighter.  
With his other hand, he raised his wand and pulled the curtains to a close, before pressing a button on the device.  
A single gas light, dangling from the ceiling, burst into life with an audible pop.   
The room was marinated in a golden tinge, the maroon of Dumbledore’s robes contrasting vividly with the the magnolia décor. Aurora had to squint somewhat from the contrast to the former darkness of her surroundings.   
Dumbledore flicked his wand once more, conjuring a piping hot flask seemingly from thin air, hovering a few feet off the ground. He floated it towards Aurora, who had managed to prop herself against the headboard after a second attempt at sitting up.  
She took the container with an element of suspicion, a look of concern etched on her face, before Dumbledore calmly explained:  
“It’s just tea, I promise you’ll feel better.”  
After another hesitant pause, she drank from the flask. Sure enough she tasted a strong brew, refined without leaves. Dumbledore sat there quietly, watching as Aurora, already warmed from the feel of the sheets, sensed a resilience grow back into her bones.   
A few minutes later she clambered out of bed, catching sight of the flowery pyjamas she had been dressed in, and feeling her regrown hair lap against her shoulder blades.   
Dumbledore gestured to the door, fixing her with a watery stare before saying almost in a whisper, “This way.”  
The door opened outwards at the sound of his voice, directing Aurora to a landing.   
It was cosily decorated with painting and bric-a-brac and a rug that snaked across the floorboards.   
She followed Dumbledore to a room at the other end, running her hand across the bannister, until she reached the handle.  
Aurora looked at Dumbledore, who wordlessly nodded before she turned the handle. The door creaked inward.  
Her mother was lying on a single frame bed, her face so pale it seemingly blended into the sheets. Yet she was very much alive. Below her gaunt cheeks, ravaged by months of mental stress, her chest rose ever so gently, steadily and with a rhythm as if peacefully sleeping.  
Without hesitating Aurora bounded across the room and knelt into her mother’s side, the duvet stifling the sobs.   
It had been a horrendous few weeks.   
She had been tested, torn apart by the viciousness of the world around her, unable to even snatch at the tormenting phantoms which had brought her to her knees. A Ministry plagued by corruption, dreams with apparitions that spoke to her, and politics of a kind that had robbed her of a sense of self-worth. Worst of all she had failed to avenge her brother and her father was dead.   
The sight of her mother still breathing, still with her even after the tumultuous nature of their lives was a relief, was a godsend that she had been utterly unprepared for.  
With her face buried in the blankets, she began to laugh between tears that had ran down her face, the relief of such a pleasant surprise overwhelming her.   
It was a weird, almost involuntary exclamation of the swelling joy, juxtaposing with the grief of the past few days.  
Her mother was still alive; she hadn’t consigned her to the same fate as the rest of her family. Something good had come from her mistakes. Elizabeth Meadows hadn’t succumbed, she had revealed her love through the power of her magic only hours before, and had survived the consequence.  
Aurora turned back to Dumbledore, whose bowed head by the doorway suggested a somewhat solemn expression, his eyes sorrowful behind his spectacles.  
“We have done what we can for her,” he explained gently. “We arrived at your home in flames only seconds after you left. Bellatrix was there to greet us, though she didn’t stay for long.   
“Laurie he let go of Mum by the…”  
“Yes,” said Dumbledore, interjecting with a raised hand again. “I understand that was the case. Fortunately, Madam Pomphrey was part of our number and she did her best to staunch the bleeding and contain the burns.”  
He gestured to Elizabeth’s sheets. Her face may have been tired and pale yet it was still very much her own, yet from Dumbledore’s tone, Aurora could deduce that the rest of her body may not have been so whole.   
“The effect of cursed fire on flesh is difficult to exaggerate,” explained Dumbledore gravely, “whilst from the few minutes I had to examine Nelson Hall before the Ministry arrived suggest that she had some part to play in its collapse?”  
“Yes,” said Aurora, almost mournful once again, “she saved me.”  
“Quite,” said Dumbledore, “an act of unspeakable love and bravery, especially when knowing the consequences involved. Nelson Hall was supported by magical structures; only truly immense magic could have broken it. Unfortunately, like with cursed fire, the beams inflicted injuries that only time can heal, it was more than conventional bruising.”  
Aurora looked at her mother once again. Below the sheets lay a body scarred and beaten, probably of blackened skin and exposed bone that was the consequence of her choices.   
She asked the only thing she could, a lump in her throat as she spoke.  
“Will she make it?” she gulped.  
“I hope so,” said Dumbledore, lowering his spectacles.  
For the first time Aurora surveyed these fresh surroundings. Aside from the bed and a tray of medication, the room was practically bare. Only a box, of simple construction, stuck out from under the bed frame, with the initials G.M inscribed across the front panel in silvery ink.  
Maintaining her composure, Aurora asked Dumbledore, “Is that his ashes?”  
“Yes. For you to bury how you see fit. I’d recommend however, the nearby graveyard, when the time is right,” replied Dumbledore.  
“The nearby…. Dumbledore where are we?”  
“Right now, you are in the new headquarters of the Resistance. A cottage Godric’s Hollow: overlooking the village green.”  
In normal circumstance Aurora would have smiled at such whimsy, though the confusion of such an answer made it difficult to think of a coherent response.   
“I know you have questions, Aurora, about Ariel’s Beaker, and about your brother,” said Dumbledore taking a grave tone.   
“You have every right to be angry with me,” he continued. “Those dreams that trouble you aren’t to be taken lightly, and I understand that I should have intervened in your pursuit of Rodolphus Lestrange much earlier than I did.”  
His voice was filled with an uncharacteristic bitterness, the glassy nature of his eyes had also somehow distilled to the point that they seemed almost hard out of a sense of bitter regret or resentment.   
“Nevertheless, I must ask you to hear out my answers, to ensure you fully understand just how much I am to blame for your losses. Only then can you reach the decisions you need to make,” said Dumbledore, turning back to the door.  
Aurora followed him out of the room and back into what was moonlighting as her bedroom, the gas light casting shadows across the room as she perched back on the bed, and Dumbledore on the chair.   
“I think,” said Dumbledore, “the time might be right for this now. There is a lot to discuss.”  
He reached into his robes and pulled out a pipe, one of a flamboyant, purple design. With a match between his fingers, he lit the device with a swift flick before inhaling deeply, the gentle tease of smoke tickling Aurora’s nostrils.   
He then nursed the pipe, sucking on it only intermittently, as Aurora asked questions that had been troubling her for weeks.   
‘Where have you been, these past few weeks, Professor?” she said earnestly, looking up, staring at his eyes which had watered considerably to the point of suggesting a vulnerability that she had hitherto unseen in the great wizard. A sharp contrast to mere seconds ago.   
“When you ask me this,” he said, their eyes meeting, “I take it you refer to what I was doing about your brother’s murder? Well…I have had to act slowly, with such care that my movements appeared glacial compared to those of your own.”  
Aurora said nothing, nor did she look away, she simply waited for him to continue.  
“As soon as news of Rupert’s passing reached me, I have been looking to track down who did it. Out of a sense of hurt, I sought justice for what was done to your brother, even if no long term goal could be achieved by capturing his killer aside from another cell for a Death Eater to escape from.”  
He sucked in his pipe, before elaborating, in a more equivocal manner, “One Death Eater wouldn’t change the war, and one murder was not out of place in a war either. Yet I knew that Voldemort wanted Ariel’s Beaker. I knew that if I could corner Rupert’s murderer, I may have been able to use legilimency to uncover his master’s plans, perhaps including the artefact. So I rationalised my fury at your brother’s passing to avenge him. Everyone in the Resistance did, they loved your brother, truly.”  
Dumbledore lowered his pipe and explained, “We were doing all we could to locate and capture Rodolphus Lestrange. I started an investigation to track down Rupert’s murderer and eventually I let in Alastor and Kingsley into my plans a few days after your brother’s funeral. Eventually the whole group was involved. We followed names, we heard whispers, and we tracked down haunts and social spots of the vilest people across Britain. As well as discovering Rodolphus killed Rupert Meadows, we discovered Gorgeous George’s plans for London, and uncovered the aggressive efforts by Death Eaters to implement change at the Ministry. Fabian was even able to pre-empt a Giant stampede down in Cornwall.”  
He shook his head as he said, “What I am confessing to, rather shamefully, is that we had to tie Rupert’s death into a wider investigation. We had to be careful and precise because of the need for appearances, and for the need to justify such efforts to destabilising the wider evil cause looking to take over our society. It wasn’t perfect. I never would have guessed they had Fudge under the Imperius Curse, something Kingsley had to expose to the Minister after Greyback escaped, and I know it meant slowing the speed of investigation into specifically Rupert’s death. This no doubt frustrated your father, who left the Resistance after your brother’s death and sought to discover the truth for himself alone.”  
Aurora felt compelled to listen, his words expressing an erudite sincerity that she seldom saw from the man.  
“Alas,” he bemoaned, “I misjudged the matter. Sure a lot was accomplished, and we were springing a trap for Rodolphus when he left the Ministry, though even I was unsure what we would do with him, preferring not to murder even a murderer. I should however, have understood how difficult it would have been for you to have waited for us to resolve Rupert’s death before considering what role you wanted to take, if any, in the war devouring our world. Even more so for Gideon, who undoubtedly felt neglected and abandoned by me, who I wanted to keep safe by taking him away from the fray. It was an instinct, of protectiveness, that I should have swatted aside but did not.”  
“You may also have thought I was following you,” said Dumbledore, inhaling from his pipe once more, “especially after Hagrid had watched you in the hospital wing, after shifts from others members of the Resistance. Truthfully I was doing that merely so someone could keep you company if you woke up, who wasn’t a school matron looking to give medical orders. I also realise that you saw Alice Longbottom in Hogsmeade. In that case, it is only because one of my sources tipped us off that the Death Eaters were very interested in your adventures. I was convinced you weren’t safe. Sure enough, you had left your mark on Diagon Alley, yet I thought that may have been misfortune rather than a want for chaos. Whatever the case, Death Eaters were following you that day in Hogsmeade. It is there you met Avery for the first time, where you were trailed by Rodolphus, double-crossed by a vampire, and even fought Rosier. Sadly, Alice was pulled out of the fray by clever subterfuge.”  
“What about Mundungus Fletcher, he was spying at me in the Leaky Cauldron?” asked Aurora.  
“Mundungus has been having a few foolish scrapes with law, and was actually seeking the help of your father for legal reasons and thought he hit the jackpot when you walked in to the pub. He used my name in the hope of convincing you to help him if it had been me requesting it. He was nothing to do with the Resistance, though after a discussion and a series of personal events, he has joined the right side.”  
“Are you sure that is wise?” said Aurora, bewildered.  
“I am certain of it,” said Dumbledore, as if wanting to close the matter.  
He then continued recounting the events of the past few weeks.  
“So, then our respective plans intertwined at the maze, with you and your father entering to attack Rodolphus. We were waiting within the Ministry to arrest him as he left. Yet Edgar Bones caught sight of Gideon within the Ministry and we were forced to intercept you. Unfortunately, Amadeus in his rage, out of a rather human sense of pride, chose to interpret my words of ‘helping you’ to mean disadvantaging you and inconveniencing you so that he could control the change of plans.”  
“I had no idea where you had gone. I had followed the trail to the underground station, having to search alone as the Ministry swarmed the Department of Mysteries and placed the headquarters under lockdown. Your father’s friend, Ms Wharton, sent an urgent owl. She did so against your father’s request, who clearly wished to resolve the situation himself and without in any way weakening the Resistance, even though we’d have come at the drop of a hat. Yet she told me of the Dark Mark, and we arrived just as you left, catching sight of that magnificent bubble Laurie conjured.”  
He stopped momentarily, before ruefully noting his last sentence, the contours of his face screwed into a look of frustration.  
“Poor Lola,” whispered Dumbledore. “Poor, poor Lola. I never predicted his role in The Vigilant. An old man’s mistake I am afraid.”  
“The Death Eaters fled the scene. Yet we still had a dilemma. For the second time that night I wasn’t sure where you’d gone. Then, however, Emmeline, who had been living undercover with prominent vigilantes, told us that everyone was assembling in Inverness, for the burning of Rodolphus Lestrange. I put two and two together, and our force arrived. Regrettably, once our rescue mission had proved successful, the Death Eaters re-emerged on the marsh. Voldemort has a fair number of dark creatures at his disposal now, alongside Ministry soldiers wearing masks, and Gorgeous George’s army of thugs who have monopolised the criminal trade across Britain. We had no choice but to leave. Rodolphus is, unfortunately, back safely amongst his brothers now.”  
“It is my fault,” he said finally, lowering his pipe.   
A single tear ran down his face.   
“I am sorry for failing to keep you safe.”  
Aurora waited, mulling over her response. She had perhaps expected to be swept away by a tide of emotion by this point, such was the startling profundity of Dumbledore’s confession. Nonetheless, she felt calm and composed, and returned his gaze with a look of determination.  
“Professor,” said Aurora, “you did what was right, with always the best of intentions. What I want to know of is the beaker, it’s affecting me more than I could have ever imagined. Haunting my dreams and distorting my reality. What is it? And why did Rupert die in its name?”  
Dumbledore dabbed out his pipe, stowing it in his robes once more before turning to the grave matter at hand.  
He spoke slower than usual, a sombre beat echoing through his word.  
“Rupert Meadows had lost his wife whilst fighting for the betterment of our entire world. She was murdered in an act of cowardice, in broad daylight standing amongst dozens of muggles. Five years ago this story would have shocked our society for a generation, yet six months ago it wasn’t even reported.”  
He shook his head before continuing, “Your brother was disillusioned, heartbroken and wracked with grief.”  
“Yet, he never wavered from a sense of purpose or determination to defend the most vulnerable from the wrath of the most dangerous Dark Wizard this nation has ever seen. So naturally, respecting also the dignified candour of your father, I approached them both to join the forces I was uniting against the Death Eaters. The Ministry was succumbing to its worst instincts and thus I had to act. Your father was a great contact to have, connected to high places, respected by the rest of the Wizengamot, and a very powerful wizard to boot. Your brother, meanwhile, was so honourable and trustworthy.”  
She had heard things along this line before, from her father, and little of it so far required much deductive reasoning on her part. She went to interrupt, to try and steer the conversation to the matters pressing her for weeks.  
Then Dumbledore said something she couldn’t have imagined.  
“Rupert Meadows also had the right blood.”  
Without even realising her actions, Aurora stood up from the bed.   
Blood? Dumbledore was speaking about the virtues of blood?   
He perhaps read the surprise exposed across her face, as he said, “Let me explain, because I want the full blame for your undoubted heartbreak.”  
She settled back on the mattress.   
“I knew Lord Voldemort was after Ariel’s Beaker,” said Dumbledore with an element of loathing in his voice.   
“He had heard tell of its properties during his expeditions across before he returned to England in the sixties. After torturing every seer across Europe, he learnt of its resting place. Within the rocks of an old shrine, a hallowed ground seen as sacred to warlocks during that period. Ariel’s Beaker had found a home there, a shimmering treasure,” explained the great wizard.   
“Unfortunately for him however, he couldn’t obtain it himself. To enter the room requires a vital aspect of our essence that Voldemort now lacks,” he added solemnly.  
“Thus his underlings, one’s powerful enough to look after themselves, yet too weak in fibre or lowly in position to defy him or betray his confidence, were given the task of collecting it.   
Borgin was always a dab hand with purloining treasures, and he had no great difficulty, whilst Voldemort’s stooge Lucius Malfoy ferried it from the antiques store to his master. A process you later saw. It took Voldemort six months to reach the decision to trust those people with such a task, it was a dithering he indulged in. Eventually he sought their assistance, thinking no one else would have heard of Ariel’s Beaker and would wish to stop him from his aims.”  
Dumbledore stood up from his chair, and began to pace the room, arms behind his back, whilst Aurora merely watched on.  
“Were it not for legilimency on my part during some unrelated travels in Europe, I wouldn’t even know he had designs on such a thing. It gave me time to prepare however,” he said. “As I knew the Beaker was incomplete and that a crucial component existed elsewhere.”  
He continued. “The fourth orb was missing, I knew it to be missing, and I set Rupert to the task of collecting it. I came clean with him about its possibly sinister qualities. He didn’t care, he merely knew that the people responsible for Stacey’s death wanted it more than anything in the world. It was enough.”  
Aurora spoke for the first time in minutes, “What do you mean ‘enough’?”  
Dumbledore, stopped his arching strides, and said, “I have no idea what he did, or how he discovered it. I merely suggested he followed the family bloodlines through some of the records in our library, but it was his quest to obtain the missing piece of the beaker. I didn’t intrude on his methods of finding it.”  
“I merely knew from his blood that he would discover it,” he said.  
Dumbledore returned back to his chair.  
“Blood,” he said mournfully, “an unsavoury subject that brings out greater bigotry than any act of passion I could name”  
“The Beaker has magical properties that activate for those of an ancient bloodline, a family line that goes back over a thousand years. Rupert Meadows, was a descendant of that line. As were you. As were many of your forebears. I knew that if he sought such an artefact, instinct would take him to it, such is the nature of old magic.”  
Aurora gulped, that was why Ariel’s Beaker had lit up for her.   
“The artefact has been lost almost since it was created. What it does, I don’t fully understand. Yet I do know, having consulted the records before, that the Nelson line that existed for nearly six hundred years were the successors to the family which crafted it. This didn’t change when your grandfather married a muggle fifty years ago and renamed you the Meadowes family after her maiden name. Which your father changed to Meadows of course,” said Dumbledore.  
“Your brother found it, and gave me the orb in my office at Hogwarts. I intended to destroy it, though within days of having it in my possession, your brother turned for the worst. Once the effect of magical bleeding, which I should have anticipated but failed to, affected your brother, I knew I had no choice but to maintain its existence,” he explained.   
“Originally I had set the task to him because I knew he was not only of your blood, but of a good nature. He would never use the beaker, or its orbs, for personal gain. I thought that would save him from its affects, and allow me to destroy the orb and render Ariel’s Beaker useless to Voldemort. Alas, I didn’t realise its warnings of destruction and devouring referred to the people holding it. A great mistake, made larger by the nature of the man making it,” said Dumbledore ruefully.  
“Your brother had dreams, visions and nightmares. He isolated himself from your family, only coming home in random erratic intervals, before for whatever reason, turning up at Liverpool Street station. Death Eaters are a simple sort. Rupert had been the thorn in their side plenty of times. I doubt they knew the task he had been set, but they probably heard whispers he had gone mad. Either way, they killed him at his most vulnerable moment.”  
‘How do you know all this? About Rupert? About the beaker?” asked Aurora, struggling to maintain a grip on the tide of words coming her way.   
“About Rupert?” said Dumbledore, raising his eyebrow. “Deduction, and the time I spent with him. We talked many times. The beaker? I travelled to find it, in my younger days, after a setback too close to home.”  
“I understood it to be myth, but heard suggestions of a different actuality,” he continued. “I wanted to deconstruct it to assess its magical properties. I wanted it for studying purposes. Yet I did not find it, fate seemed to punish me in that respect. Rightly as there was no altruism in my aim but arrogance, a trait I was still learning to tame. Instead I stumbled upon it by chance five years ago when trying to uncover the reason for such a high concentration of magic near a muggle village. A matter that had missed the attention of the Ministry. Within the hollow of a ravine, engraved with the markings of a wizarding order that died nine hundred years ago, rested the Beaker, set on a simple plinth, unguarded and untamed. It had only three orbs, the fourth missing, yet it was unmistakeable, its description adhering to old legend. I had no idea what its function was, other than from visual inspection, realising its method of dreams. A matter you confirmed to me in my office a month ago. Of course I wished to take it, but I knew myself too well. I knew of its rumoured dangers, I could read the Saxon engravings warning of its violent nature, yet I knew I would be tempted. If I understood the device, I would look to use it. I could have destroyed it, but it was a sentient artefact. It can sense you, I am sure of it, and I didn’t want to provoke any old magic we had no understanding of. So I left it untouched knowing that reporting it to the Ministry would tempt greater men than me, and knew that any efforts to guard it would lure me to its enigmas. For five years I chose not to think about it, until this war broke out in full voice, and Voldemort’s ambitions for magical treasures forced my hand.”  
“So you don’t have any idea what it is?” said Aurora disappointed.  
“I have few ideas, and even fewer facts I am afraid, it comes from a world before our own.’   
“Then why did you let me touch it? In your office,” she replied, aghast.   
“It was too late to prevent its influence on you,” he said regretfully. “The artefact works through blood, and after it was activated by your brother’s touch, my fault I know, you were always the next. I am not sure if it seeks to use you, or to be used by you, but it cost your brother his sanity.”  
‘Instead I wanted you to familiarise yourself with the object. If you were at least able to discover where the dreams came from, that I knew were inevitable, another reason why I wanted you away from enemy fire by the way, then maybe you had a chance. It didn’t matter whether you touched it, it knew you to be in the land of the living and crept across your soul as a consequence. You have been seeing messengers already I am sure. Have any appeared in any way you can think of, that may have appeared out of context, beyond your dreams?”  
The thoughts came to her with a sudden immediacy that had been absent from her mind in the days before.  
‘The two twins,” she said, remembering their appearance in the lift.  
Then with a hitherto unseen clarity, she thought of the musician from her dreams, and a smiling guest from that night when she first arrived in England, “the busker and the girl on the train.”  
It had come to her, that girl with the blonde hair from the train journey before Halloween, she had been identical to the one that Meridia had greeted her in her dreams.   
“Quite,” said Dumbledore, “perhaps it is time you told me what you have seen, before I tell you what I know of the origins of Ariel’s Beaker?  
Aurora spoke quickly though Dumbledore’s keen hearing picked up every word.   
She spoke of how it lit up and sang to her with musical notes. She told him of her dream with Barnabus, Meridia, the woman with maggot eyes, and the supposed gatekeepers of her recollections, the twins. She spoke of her nightmare, of some being called the Seer granting her power, of the mutilated baby, which later sought only to kill, and of how these beings were finding ways of speaking and appearing in front of outside the realms of her sleep. Aurora told him of the words, “Devour, Desire, Destroy” and “Decide” which had marked her experiences, and as expressing these developments turned on a tap she found difficult to turn off, she confessed just how frightened these delusions made her.   
Thankfully Dumbledore spoke once more before she could dwell on the matter any further.  
“I have been able to piece together the story through legilimency, reading and theory,” he said. ‘A lot of this is a step into the realm of uncertainty I am afraid, but naturally I have every confidence I am correct. Much of this is only what legend once said, and what time has since forgotten. For a long while, having heard whispers and inklings of the tale, I was mystified at why it was kept secret. A fable is as important to our history as anything we consider to be fact. We expose more of how we see ourselves through folklore than we do through any other ‘truths’.   
He continued, “So you will be surprised that only a few works in the Hogwarts Library even reference the tale, and all appear solely in the bindings of fiction and fairy tales, at my request. Those that speak of it more frankly have been removed from the shelves. It was only a handful of books, dark histories indeed. There weren’t many at all, for the crucial details of Ariel’s Beaker have been purged from history long ago. Yet, enough was discoverable for me to pursue the matter, and find a fuller picture. And enough was there for me to later remove their contents from the school. The dangers of the artefact were clear to me, even if I understood little of it.”  
His voice then shifted to an almost storybook tone, as he said, “Nine hundred years ago there lived a gallant, young wizard named Barnabus. He was handsome, swift with wand and sword, strong of body, and one of the first great students of Hogwarts, by all accounts a noble hero to be moulded to a cause. A protégé of Salazar Slytherin: it is fair to say Barnabus had an ambition for such questing fame. His father was chief warlock of Pevelsee, a wizarding settlement now lost to the ashes of time. Little evidence of the place exists now, only fragments of the magic that defined it. It was a unique place, home to ancient magic. Magic that was strange, and unhinged, of a time before wandlore. It was magic of ritual, of sacrifice, and of the abstract, of things that could not possibly be. Oh, the place was one of magical fertility, where magic was provoked and pulled apart by the most powerful casters of its day.”  
Aurora wasn’t sure where such a tale was going, and tacitly accepted Dumbledore’s awareness of such a story, told in this lyrical way. Yet she sat quietly letting his words wash over her.  
“It existed as such for centuries,” he said, “defying the creation of Ollivanders and defying the binding of our society. It was wild magic, where the very bones of our essence and understanding of magic were dangerous challenged. No Ministry was around a thousand years ago, yet a pact was made with the warlocks that dwelt there and wider community to combine their magic with the respected wand lore, to ensure the safety of the society at large. There was a requirement for it co-exist with the later Saxon spell craft, the layers of intricate wand work that warlocks then used to tame some of the toxicity of the place. In return, Pevelsee was created, a settlement that would become the crossroads for magical inquiry and experimentation across what we now call Europe. After the pact, they suffered no problems in its first couple of decades. Leaving Barnabus, the heir, free to pursue his own desires. So he embarked on many a challenge, earning fame and repute. At the mere age of twenty-two, your age, he had slain seven dragons, saved a hundred goblins from a horde of chimaeras, and protected two witches’ covens from muggle marauders. He was loved, truthfully, revered across the land, his tale an inspiration that championed the power of wizards to do good.”  
“Yet it was never to last” he said ruefully. “His father passed away, and by his mid-twenties he was forced to return home, to ensure the fair maintenance and protection of Pevelsee, the most volatile wizarding habitat ever created. Under normal circumstances no one so young would be given such a task, yet his name proceeded him. On arrival home, he chose a bride. It was a choice of course. Every young woman from Cornwall to Caledonia was interested in his hand. That is when Meridia, possibly the greatest sorceress the wizarding world had ever seen, and naturally eroded from history as a consequence, impressed him with her ability to distort the world around here. I don’t know what she did but at a banquet colourfully known as the Feast for Maggots, she showed him a manipulation. By this, I mean a series of ruptures and rifts to magical understanding so great that the only alternative to marrying her would have been to kill her. Some claim that she could turn dreams to life. That she could grant people a power beyond compare, to provide them with the ability to turn their greatest fantasies into reality. Others have guessed she could turn time to her bidding, and that she could bring through armies of the dead from past eons. Whatever the case, she later created a proposal gift, a trophy that allowed one to ‘drink the visions of the future’.”  
Aurora frowned, before Dumbledore said, “Again, I have no true answer for what this meant, perhaps one had to witness her to fully understand its affect, and how it worked. Yet I know it combined the wild nature of their surroundings, of the magic of ancient times, with the complicated and intricate web of Saxon runes and incantations. It was raw, with a power beyond measure, but delicate and precise like the best magic of its time. It was displayed as a jewel, a trophy, to the populace, a trinket with its real function hidden. The best way to hide it being keeping it in plain sight. It was called Ariel’s Beaker – declared as such by Meridia.”  
Dumbledore seemed to almost question himself as he asked, “Why Ariel? Well…”  
He spoke in a lower register, as he explained, “I don’t know what is meant by this. Other than that three years into their marriage, with the settlement maintaining its safety and yet continuing to embellish its reputation for magical manipulation, a Seer visited Pevelsee. She took no physical form, and was merely a voice that spoke through anything she wished to command the will of. The Seer gained an audience with Barnabus, and they shared private words. It led to seminal revelations. Firstly, it was understood that the Seer was the mother of Meridia, and that Meridia was more than two thousand years old, and supposedly immortal. A revelation that shook even the most eccentric members of the settlement, and infuriated Barnabus. He felt, I imagine, as if their marriage was one of falsehoods, where he wasn’t equal to his wife. A matter of shame amongst his fellows. Secondly, it was then revealed to him that Meridia had little understanding of how she created the artefact known as Ariel’s Beaker. and that as a quest, he should discover what it did for himself. For Barnabus lacked any understanding that people may have any interest in deceiving him, lacking the mental strength to complement his physical vigour, he took on such a challenge.”  
Dumbledore shook his head, and said, “The translations suggest he somehow drank from the beaker, and from there apparitions showed him a world of glory, away from the lulls of political maintenance on his throne. It was something he missed so dearly. All he had to do was provide a daughterof his blood. Why they were wanted, has never been understood yet the couple put their marital rift to one side and gave birth to a child, their blood empowering the Beaker to its full effect. Meridia thinking Barnabus had forgiven her, and Barnabus only interested in the consequences of the Beaker. They had a girl, and at the ceremony, named her Ariel. She allegedly touched the beaker, which had been laid out in the centre of a crowd, gaining the power to walk at only a few hours old. At that point, Pevelsee disappeared, with Barnabus and his magical peoples never seen again.”   
Aurora, alarmed by the developments, let out a gasp as Dumbledore continued.  
“Where Pevelesee was is now where North London sits, hidden in the depths of the earth, constricted by time and brick. The area is dormant, only tiny hints of what was there found deep beneath the earth. The few concentrations of magic left are directly below your former home, the Septima, in London, an old palace, now owned by the Lestranges ever since your grandfather disinherited it in the twenties.”   
“I don’t know what happened to them,” he concluded, “and only twice through history have people have attempted to find the beaker. It is that difficult to find clues to its location, with only a reference of it in Bathilda Bagshot’s book and a few children’s tales mentioning it as a fictional treasure item attributed to the mind of Beedle the Bard. Each time they have sought to find it, they never been heard of again.My guesses however, where that these are the others you see.”  
“The woman with no eyes…..the twins….” whispered Aurora.  
“Yes,” said Dumbledore. “I can only guess but I imagine that within Ariel’s Beaker, their magical world still lives such as the power of the artefact. Their story, the trauma of whatever happened at the Seer’s bidding being compelled to repeat, out of order and sync but terrifying each time I am sure.   
“I saw visions…of Meridia killing a child, of Barnabus at a feast of human flesh…”  
“I am certain you did…”  
There was an uneasy pause, a truce in the repartee before Dumbledore softly explained the matter further, with his tenderness of speech somehow making the situation seem graver.   
“No one knows what the power of Ariel’s Beaker truly is,” he said, “which makes Lord Voldemort’s search for it all the more dangerous. I imagine the settlement may have been plagued with apparitions, as in twisted and dark and creatures impossible to combat with our wandlore. Perhaps it was they who traumatised the minds of every citizen. Why and for what reason, I can’t say. But I imagine their world is constantly beating against the edges of their magical prison. Those are the people you see bleed into your reality.”  
An icy feeling of shock was coursing through Aurora’s veins as she said, “The Seer…Professor, she was helping me, she even granted me a power.”  
“Do you know what this power might be?” asked Dumbledore  
Aurora shook her head.   
“I can’t explain this Seer’s intention, but I will say that mystics of fate were very different to the frauds of our time, and to be wary,” he said.  
“That’s it, be wary?” said Aurora, somewhat bemused.  
“There’s not much we can do until you see more. I have no way to fight them, this is clearly a challenge for your bloodline to resolve, as much as we will try and help you.”  
“So what happens now?”  
“We continue our struggle against the Ministry’s corrupting influences, both Death Eaters and criminals. We bring light where there is dark and joy where there is misery. All the while I have the fourth orb, safely locked in my office behind magic not even Voldemort can break through. Eventually he will understand what is known of the Beaker’s history and whose blood line it correlates to, and will look for you. I imagine he will deduce that I have the remaining piece and will probably try to capture you so that I surrender it. With your blood, and final orb, he will hope to have whatever power is there to allow him to end the war with total control. Of course we won’t let that happen.”  
“Isn’t this leaving too much to chance?”  
“You will have to discover the realities of the beaker. It may go quiet for some time, perhaps, after the emotional trauma of the past few days. Yet though you may be in a weakened state, I doubt every force is hostile to you. I imagine that whatever this artefact is, it is meant for you, and your blood line, to do things we don’t truly know of yet. It will call for you. There will be creatures in there who love you as much as there will be creatures seeking to kill you. Such as that poor child you mentioned earlier in those dreams.”  
There was an even longer extension, a pregnant break of conversation as they both sat, seemingly expressionless, staring at the floor. Until Dumbledore brought forward a further volley of bad news.  
“It is probably also time that you saw this…” said Dumbledore.  
He reached for a pile of papers on the desk, which Aurora realised was a draft version of the Prophet, an assortment of newsprint in an unbound form.   
“You have only been unconscious for a few hours, but this is tomorrow morning’s copy of the Prophet, they haven’t let this crisis go to waste,” he scowled dismissively.  
Dumbledore pulled out one of the pages from the middle of the stack and handed it to Aurora.  
She took it and scanned its contents.   
At the top it detailed some story of a famous glamour witch getting divorced, whilst a garish advertisement for Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans engulfed the mid-section of the page.  
The bottom article however, was a Ministry report, grisly adorned with a photograph of her home. It appeared in its full proud form, a picture Aurora recognised as one her mother had taken privately at home. Yet every few seconds it morphed into the blackened husk of Nelson Hall after it had been destroyed by Bellatrix Lestrange. A darkened sky lay behind its charred frame but inexplicably the Dark Mark, which would have lingered for hours after the Death Eaters left, had been doctored from the photo.  
Titled above the report were the words: “Wanted: Aurora Jane Meadows – for the murders of Gideon Randolph Meadows, Elizabeth Octavia Meadows and Rupert Oliver Meadows.”  
No profile yet had been given of her face, but the article damned her enough.  
It made no attempt for presumption of innocence in its wild retellings.   
It detailed the arson and destruction of Nelson Hall, and suggested it being at her hand. Apparently, she murdered her two parents, following her murder of her younger brother weeks before. Though no reason was given to this other than the allusion of insanity. Also, no mention was made of her fight at the Ministry, that intrusion was seemingly forgiven or hushed up so the reader had no suggestion that place was fallible to break-ins. Instead it detailed her as a dangerous, burning, psychopathic murderer. A bold move considering that they didn’t find her father’s ashes, and were wrong about her mother even being dead.  
The article summarised by saying she was a killer that should not be approached, and that anyone who saw her should contact the Ministry. There was even a reward of 2,000 galleons for information leading to her capture. An absurd amount, a huge increase on what Gorgeous George’s men were offered for her head.   
It would be impossible to tread foot in public now.   
The weird thing was that her alleged callous barbarity hadn’t made the front page, and instead was found in the centre fold, often seen as the second most important page for a story.   
“Well, it isn’t the most truthful thing I have read in the prophet,” she said coldly.   
“It is a perfect storm, I am afraid,” said Dumbledore, touching her on the shoulder in an effort to reassure. “There is a fair share of people at the Ministry who are opposed to any sort of independent action like the kind you displayed yesterday morning, especially when it concerns breaking into the Department of Mysteries. Whilst Voldemort’s recruits have enough influence in the institution to take advantage. They have used the events to cover their murders in Nelson Hall, to the point of getting Ministry photographers at crime scenes to alter photos and hush up their actions. This has the mutual benefit of covering the Ministry too. Besides the story of a wealthy, pretty girl murdering her family has a depressing element of scandal and intrigue compared to Death Eater depravity. So it is good copy for the Prophet, whilst also benefiting the Ministry as it leads people off the scent of Gideon’s shameful departure from their courts and the attempts to railroad justice, and the failings to protect you or your family. Whilst it benefits the evilest wizards across our society by hiding their actions. Consequently, it is you who has been blamed for the chaos of the past few days. They are brazen enough to accuse you of murder, and this gives them all every opportunity to take revenge and silence you.”  
Aurora let out a low whistle as Dumbledore continued speaking on the matter, calmly but with a clear tone of disgust.  
“It also perfectly confuses any friends of your father who may have taken you in. They have suggested you have gone mad, to the point of murdering your entire family, and as you are in hiding and aren’t explaining yourself – it suggests guilt. They may not believe it but it sows doubts in their mind.”  
“You’d have thought people would have noticed such leaning going on in the Prophet…” she said bitterly.  
She took hold of the rest of the pile, scanning through its pages, seeing if any other aberrations lay in its depths.   
Though omission defined every line of prose, it had the artistic décor and tone of a respectable paper, thus making her guilt seem so credible.   
“Yet they do not. The Ministry has already taken credit for destroying the Vigilant, look at the front page,” noted Dumbledore.  
Aurora flicked back to the front. In bold type, the prophet boasted of brave Ministry aurors clamping down on street thugs and gangs, such as the Vigilant, who they had falsely attributed a series of murders to.   
“Do you think, now the Ministry are pursuing me, that Voldemort may know already?” she said, trying to suppress any tremors of fear from creeping out of her lips.  
Dumbledore leant back before saying, “For now, it is unlikely. As I said earlier, he probably is of the opinion that the fourth orb may be in my possession, but I doubt his Death Eaters are aware of the artefact, aside from the select two who ferried it to him, and the two others who witnessed it at Borgin and Burke’s. Considering the reports I hear of him scouring Cornwall, he is probably on the right track, but I doubt he knows of Pevelsee yet.’  
“I do however, as I also said earlier,” explained Dumbledore gravely, “think it is inevitable that he will recognise your importance. It is only a matter of time before he realises its blood nature, and the descending lines of the artefact. It may take him a while, but it won’t be merely the Ministry pursuing you before long. It wounds me to say it but there is little I can do, aside from help you solve the mysteries of the beaker as revelations come your way, and eventually destroy it.”  
Aurora drank in this information. Really none of this was a surprise to her. A momentous ancient weapon   
“My father said that if I fled to the States the problems will go away,” muttered Aurora bitterly.  
She looked and Dumbledore and with a measure of resilience said, “Yet, I can’t leave Britain as it is now, torn by war, and with people suffering at my doing. Besides, these apparitions, these fantasies in my head, they will follow me wherever I go, won’t they?   
“Yes,” said Dumbledore almost apologetically.   
“I could flee to the States and they would still haunt me.”  
“Precisely.”  
“They will probably get worse, like they did for my brother.”  
“Sadly a probability.”  
“And the fact is I am always going to be on the run unless I resolve this aren’t I? “  
“Yes.”  
“And to reiterate: you will you help me understand Ariel’s Beaker, and what it is doing to me?”  
“Of course. Together we will solve its mystery, and prevent the darkest wizard of all time from using it for his own ends.”  
He paused, the depths of his blue irises focused solely on her.  
“Do you want to join us?” he said.  
Aurora didn’t need to think about this any further. Running away to America wasn’t going to solve her problems, now that the beaker had claimed her it was up to her to discover its mysteries and to prevent Voldemort from obtaining the fourth orb. She was also more keen than ever to leave her mark on the war, taking as many Death Eaters with her if her fate was to be death.  
Thus she nodded without hesitation.   
“Good,” said Dumbledore, his eyes betraying a suddenly optimistic sheen of hope.   
“There is change afoot,” he continued, tucking the chair behind the desk and rising to his feet. “With the events of the past weeks taking place as they have done. I have lost all confidence in the Ministry to the point I am looking to create a more organised strategy. Within the hour, our friends shall arrive downstairs, please come down when you are ready. I hope Madam Pomphrey grew your hair back to the acceptable length. Help yourself to anything in the wardrobe.”  
He gestured to the cupboard opposite the bed, and then with a parting smile and swish of his cloak, departed downstairs.  
Aurora waited for the door to close and then went to the wardrobe.  
Inside were a collection of beautiful, yet antiquated wizarding robes, even for a magical society they seemed date with cuffs and stiff collars. Nonetheless, preferring it to the admittedly smooth silk of her pyjamas, she fitted herself into a sweeping maroon gown and then proceeded to tame the most eccentric elements of the clothing with her wand. She didn’t modernise it completely, out of respect for the nature of it not being hers to keep, but just enough so she didn’t look like a fussy noble woman.   
Then she led down on the bed, and mulled through the conversation that had just occurred. What he said to her seemed absurd and terrifying yet also utterly plausible. Yet she found it impossible to scrutinise the matter, still raw from the emotional trauma of losing her father, a thought that ached with every beat of her heart.  
So she remained as blank as possible for a long while before making her way downstairs.  
To Aurora’s surprise she was greeted in the hall by Theo, who without a flicker of hesitation embraced her in a hug. He gestured towards a door to the right, exposing a stone floored dining room, with a table that stretched thirty feet from one end to the other with ample seating either side.   
Lit by wax candle, the walls were barely visible to her, all the light reflecting instead of the oak surface.   
The room was currently empty, and she took a seat on one flank next to Theo who reclined into the curved chairs with a groan.  
Within the next twenty minutes, a procession of people entered, coming through a door they seemingly apparated to, arriving exactly in the same spot each time. They came in clusters, each cluster guided by Mad-Eye Moody, who Aurora saw was making a determined effort not to look at her.   
Was he mad at her? She thought.  
One by one familiar faces took place in empty chairs, all not speaking to Aurora, but also not to each other, their moods sombre but strangely determined.  
Alice Longbottom had spearheaded the arrivals, followed by Kingsley, Amadeus, Edgar Bones, Dedalus Diggle, Elphias Doge, Emmeline Vance and even her cousin Dorcas, who chose to sit as far away from her as possible. She was the only one to express any emotion, snarling as she passed Aurora, though quietly enough that few noticed and those that did made no effort to question her.   
Hagrid compensated by smiling as he squeezed through the door frame. Accompanying him were the two Prewetts, who she sort-of knew, and a pair of females Boneses.   
A parade of former teachers, from Flitwick to McGonagall to Sprout found their place at the table.   
Then a half-dozen that she didn’t know of sat in the remaining chairs, before lastly Mundungus Fletcher snuck in at the back, finding a place on a stool at the back.   
They sat there in complete silence, their stoicism extending into the horizon of time until Dumbledore came through a door at the far end.  
With the click of that metal device he had brought out when she first awoke, the candles brightened up considerably, expressing the red and white stripes of wall paper in all their camp glory. A jarring contrast to the serious nature of their meeting.   
On his shoulder, an infant phoenix was perched, Fawkes in reincarnated form. Somewhat ugly in appearance, it had only a mere smattering of feathers, and a beak flopping below his bowed head.   
“Sorry,” said Dumbledore tunefully, “but Fawkes prefers the light.”  
He waited, Aurora noticing every head turned in his direction, before sitting down in chair at the head of the table. It was no throne, yet its distance from the other chairs suggested an authority that made him leader.  
The old man leant in, his eyes so viscerally blue above his half-moon spectacles, and said:  
“Welcome, everyone, to the Order of the Phoenix.”


End file.
